


Be Here, By Me

by featherxquill



Category: Scott & Bailey
Genre: Case Fic, F/F, Female Friendship, Femslash, Formerly Straight Female Character, Lesbian Character, Police, Women Being Awesome, navigating personal and professional lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:53:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2158179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agápe, éros, philía, storgē. The Ancient Greeks had four different words for four different types of love. Throughout the course of their lives, Gill Murray and Julie Dodson have felt all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Content Info:** The bulk of this fic is set during the Bevan House investigation of Season 3 (episodes 4 and 5, 'Cradle' and 'Witness'). As such, it contains references to the events/themes of those episodes, to about the same degree of intensity as the show does. Along with this, there is some more in-depth discussion of attempted suicide/self-harm, mostly with regard to Helen Bartlett. 
> 
> **Author's Notes:** Many, many thanks to [sophiegrace](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiegrace/pseuds/sophiegrace) for cheerleading me through so much of this fic. Quite a lot of the backstory for these ladies was developed with her input, and her early comments helped me shape this fic into what it became. There will be more in-depth notes at the end of this fic, so readers will know just how much she contributed to this story. To [kathryne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/pseuds/kathryne), thank you for the fantastic beta job, the encouragement, and the title ideas. I have probably also stolen some headcanons from you. Finally, thanks to sidewayswithanaubergine for reading this over and helping me make it as Northern as possible. You are all awesome <3.

**i.**

Six months after Julie becomes Superintendent, everything changes.

In their usual way - busy as hell, but comfortable enough that they don’t need to ring each other every week to stay friends - it takes Gill and Julie that long to go out and celebrate the promotion. Gill apologises by buying the first bottle of wine and saying "I'm ashamed that it's taken this long," as she pours it.

Julie waves the apology away, inclining her head in thanks as she takes the glass, then leans back into her seat. Her eyes scan casually over the crowd in the pub before she returns her attention to Gill. "It's fine," she says. "I know how it is for you, and I'm busier than ever, what with all the arse I've had to kiss since taking the job. They don't put that part in the description: superior posterior adhesion required."

Gill smiles, because that's all that needs to be said. They don't mention the other things - that Gill may have been inclined to go for the position herself, if Julie hadn't, that part of the reason they've taken this long is politics - it wouldn't have done to be seen to be too chummy while Julie was investigating one of Gill's team. That's all work, all bollocks, and they've never let any of that stand in the way of their friendship.

"Well, cheers anyway," Gill says. "Congratulations, or happy six month anniversary, or something." She lifts her glass in salute, Julie responds, and they both take a swallow of their wine.

"How's the boy?" Julie asks, moving on immediately. Her lips twitch into a smile, and she adds, mock offhand, "Oh, and Sammy too, of course."

Gill smiles, rolls her eyes. "Sammy’s well. He's almost finished PCSO training; brought his uniform home the other day and tried it on for me. Bloody strange, let me tell you. Wasn't sure whether to be proud or terrified."

"Aw." Julie sounds half mocking and half earnest. "Did he look like a tiny Dave?"

"Well, yes, but I won't hold that against him. Here's hoping no one else will, either."

Julie sips her wine. "Don't think that's likely, given what a mad bitch of a mother he's got."

"Well, exactly," Gill replies, with a little grin. "And _the boy_ , since you asked, is gone as of a few months ago." She says that part matter-of-fact, no bitterness or regret, and Julie arches an eyebrow.

"Not enough stamina after all?"

Gill doesn't want to speak ill of him, even in jest. The ending was mutual, respectful, adult, and it felt good to move on from someone without her life and heart in tatters. "No, he had plenty of stamina, it just ran its course is all."

Julie smirks. "I was talking about you, love."

Gill laughs. "Of course you were. I'll have you know, I just about invented the multiple orgasm."

Julie leers over her wine glass. "Oh _really_. Well isn't that a useful piece of information to have." Julie blinks slowly, keeping eye-contact, and Gill doesn't look away. It's nothing unusual; their friendship has always been infused with a sort of casual tension - isn't that normal, when Julie's never made a secret of her sexuality? - but tonight it doesn't wash straight past, it lingers for a moment. There's something there, Gill thinks, something different within her tonight - perhaps connected to the realisation that sometimes things don't go tits-up - but she doesn't reach for it because the thought comes with a flutter in her belly that isn't entirely comfortable. She looks down into her wine glass instead, and when she glances up again the moment has gone. 

Probably better that way.

"And you?" Gill asks, moving onto ground that feels steadier. "How's Delilah?"

"Good," Julie answers, rather quickly. "Haven't been able to get out to see her as often as I'd like, lately, but I know she's well taken care of."

Gill smiles, loves the way Julie says it. Anyone overhearing would think she was talking about a mother tucked up in a home somewhere, but in fact Delilah is Julie's horse. Coming out while they were still in uniform, Julie didn't bat an eyelid, and she's never had any problem striding and bollocking her way to the top, whispers of 'bitch' be damned. But owning a horse and being an enthusiastic polo player is far too posh a hobby for a police officer, especially since it's the last remaining habit from her education at a snooty private school. Gill's been Julie's friend long enough to be trusted with her deep, dark secret - long enough that she knows all of them, as Julie does hers - but they still talk about the horse in code, as though discussing an infidelity.

"Must be why your arse is looking wider," Gill says, "not enough time in the saddle."

"Put a saddle on you, you're not careful."

"Putting one on Karen Zalinski would probably be more useful."

Julie snorts. "She'd bite. Throw me off."

"And I wouldn't?" Gill cocks an eyebrow.

Julie pierces her with a stare. "I don't know. Would you?"

Gill takes rather a large mouthful of wine.

*

Two hours and a bottle and a half later, Gill has moved to sit on the bench seat alongside Julie, whose heel-clad feet now occupy the vacated chair. Shoulder to shoulder lets them hear each other over the increasingly loud music in the pub, and also gives them a nice vantage for people-watching.

"Robbed someone," Julie says, eyeing a burly bloke in a beanie. "Buying beer with his ill-gotten gains."

"Robbed a cash machine," Gill adds. "Pulled it out of the wall with his bare hands."

"Mm," Julie murmurs, "and punched a pensioner who tried to raise the alarm."

"Bastard," Gill quips.

"Total shitbag," Julie agrees.

It's a familiar game, coming up with increasingly outlandish stories about the potential criminal histories of random - and probably entirely pleasant - fellow patrons.

"That one there," Gill says, nodding her head toward a woman - tall, black, legs up to her neck - "accidentally killed her last lover. Smothered him in the throes of passion, sitting on his face."

"Her," Julie says, and Gill glances at her in confusion, prompting her to clarify. "Smothered _her_. You can't tell me there's a man in the world could give head that good."

"Right," Gill responds, smiling. "I wouldn't know. I'll take your word for it."

"Pity," Julie says, and doesn't elaborate.

*

"Are we getting old?" Julie asks, as she swings her front door open and holds it for Gill. "Or is everyone else getting younger?" It's barely midnight and they've packed it in, sick of the noise in the pub and the increasingly raucous behaviour of their fellow patrons.

Gill slips past into the house. "Both, probably," she says over her shoulder, "but don't tell anyone."

Julie's home is a renovated Edwardian, semi-detached, in one of the more up-market suburbs north of the city centre. Gill has stayed here many times over the years, after a night out. She flicks a light on and drops her bag on the settee while Julie is still fiddling around with door locks, and by the time Julie joins her in the living room she's half-sitting on the back of said settee, one shoe already discarded, rubbing the ball of her stockinged foot.

Julie deposits her own bag on a side table. "Should I open another bottle, or would you prefer a brew?"

Gill loosens her other shoe-strap, smiles. "God, we're not that old. Think I can manage at least one more proper drink without making a fool of myself, if you can."

Julie shrugs her jacket off and tosses it over the top of her bag. "Red or white?"

"Whatever's handy." Gill lets her other shoe drop to the floor as Julie disappears in the direction of the kitchen.

"Put the telly on, if you like," Julie calls from the other room.

Gill glances at her watch. "It'll all be shite, this time of night. What've you got on the thingy?" Gill eyes the little black box under Julie's television, can't remember what it's called. She's not a total loss when it comes to technology - knows enough to not look like an idiot in front of people - but what's the point in having a teenager if you can't annoy him by never quite learning how to program the electronics?

"Nothing new you'll like," comes Julie's response. "It's mostly _Game of Thrones_ at the moment."

Gill and Julie share a love of good comedy, but Gill will never be able to understand Julie's enjoyment of hyper-violent television (too much like what they see every day) any more than Julie can fathom the pleasure Gill takes in curling up with a costume drama (boring and stuffy, apparently).

"You're a barbarian," Gill calls, padding around the settee and settling onto it, propping a pillow behind her back and stretching her feet out across the cushions. "It's all right, the quiet's nice anyway. My ears are ringing from the noise in that pub." She wriggles a bit, getting comfortable, and listens to the sound of glasses chiming as Julie fetches the wine.

Moments later, Julie returns, a glass of red in each hand and a bag of crisps between two fingers. She drops the crisps onto the coffee table and hands one glass to Gill, taking a sip from her own and tapping Gill's feet with a finger. "Lift," she says, and Gill does, tugging them back for long enough to let her get comfortable. Julie toes her own shoes off with a pleased sigh and arranges herself in the corner, at which point Gill's feet go right back to where they were, which is now in Julie's lap.

"Oh, make yourself comfortable," Julie says, smiling.

"Guest privileges," Gill responds. "Besides, you got to put your feet up in the pub."

"Mm, exactly the same," Julie murmurs, but the smile remains, and a moment later the fingers of her free hand curl around Gill's ankle.

Silence falls, for a time. Gill sips her wine and closes her eyes a moment. Now, in the soft seat, she finds she is tired - not monumentally so, but the quiet and the wine and the warmth of Julie's body under her stockinged feet are all conspiring to make her feel lazy and drowsy in a way she hadn't minutes ago. She opens her eyes again, just in case, finds Julie looking at her.

"So," Julie says, and her voice is no quieter than it's been all night but the tone is different somehow. "This bloke, the boy. He treated you right, did he? I don't have to ruin any careers with my new power?"

Gill smiles, props an elbow up on the settee cushion and leans her head against her hand. "You don't, no. He was good, _it_ was, but I don't think it was something either of us expected to be long-term, and when it got to that place where the next step was something altogether more serious, we left it there. I'm pleased, if that doesn't sound bizarre to say - I needed the reminder that people can be adult about these things. Gives me hope."

"For what?" Julie asks.

"The future," Gill says. "Other people, possibilities. If I can do it once without fucking it up completely, I can do it again, maybe with someone I _can_ see a long-term with."

Julie's thumb traces over the ball of Gill's ankle, back again. Her gaze is fixed there, stays that way for a beat too long, and when she looks up at Gill again her eyes are just slightly too wide.

"I'm glad," she says. "I wouldn't know how to ruin an NPIA’s career anyway." She smiles, but the expression sits oddly on her face.

Gill peers at her, puzzled by the response. "What's up?"

Gill can see that Julie's next breath is rattled, reads a lie in the tiny shake she gives her head before she even speaks. "Nothing. Nothing. I'm… Nothing."

Gill feels her eyebrows lift toward her hairline. It's not like Julie to be inarticulate. Blunt, certainly, and occasionally condescending, but never inarticulate. Gill recognises, somewhere, that it could be better to leave whatever this is unsaid, but she doesn't. Feels inclined toward risk-taking. She curls her toes, gives Julie's thigh a nudge. "Doesn't seem like nothing."

"Really," Julie responds, entirely too quickly. "I'm ridiculous. Ignore me."

Gill feels a flicker of concern, now. "I don't think I can, Slap. Have you heard something? Am I wrong about why Chris and I ended?" The idea comes with a sickening twist of the gut.

"No," Julie is quick to reassure her. "Nothing like that, I promise."

"Then what…?"

Julie's grip on Gill's ankle tightens. She looks up again, and her eyes are even bigger this time. "I don't want to ruin everything." She sounds smaller than Gill's ever heard her sound before, like maybe for five minutes she's something other than a force of nature.

Actually, that's not entirely true. Gill does remember Julie being like this before, but only the once, a very long time ago, before they knew so many of each other's secrets.

They'd worked at the same station when they were starting out, Julie a few years ahead of Gill but both of them green. They were on different teams, but they found that the shared experience of institutionalised sexism that was the police force in the 1980s drew them together and provided the basis for the kind of passing friendship that involved drinks after work or bitching about the attitudes of their male colleagues in the loos. After about two years of that, they were moved onto the same team. They got to know each other better then, even if they rarely got to work side-by-side, WPCs in those days usually being paired up with their male colleagues and used to soften the blow of an arrest or death message. They were usually expected to reassure worried families or console grieving mothers, and they bonded quickly over how ill-suited they were to that, taking adjacent desks so they could mutter snarky commentary after returning from one of those jaunts. Their friendship grew in laughter, in the moments in between, and perhaps grew faster, stronger because of that. They didn't have to endure the petty frustrations that came with the tedium of spending entire days stuck in a car together, or in a tech suite reviewing security footage, but they could debrief afterwards, or exchange glances at team meetings. Julie wrote satires with her eyebrows and Gill learned to smile so subtly that no one else would notice, and they didn't have to team up and interrogate people to develop their own shorthand.

Even so, they did occasionally head out together, and Gill remembers one such day when they were on the outskirts of Carrington, having completed the task they were assigned to with time to spare. In the preceding weeks, Gill remembers, Julie had asked Gill to cover her morning shift unusually often, to the point where Gill had made a crack one day, asking Julie if she was dating a vampire or something, had to get in a shag before dawn. Julie had laughed, responded, bold as ever, 'Yeah, it's Mina Harker, right out of _Dracula_ ; she likes to eat me for breakfast', but she'd never actually offered an explanation for why she needed the mornings off. That day, though, out in the countryside, Julie glanced askance at Gill from the driver's seat and said 'So, do you want to meet Mina Harker, then?', to which Gill, bemused but curious, answered in the affirmative.

Gill didn't know what to expect when Julie pulled off the main road. Logically she knew that they were not headed for a looming gothic manor, but even so, she was surprised by the rustic farmhouse that came into view as they rolled up the driveway. That surprise increased when, climbing out of the car, Julie didn't lead Gill to the front door but instead to a side gate, which she unlatched to let herself through.

'Shouldn't we have a warrant for this?' Gill asked, smiling, eyeing Julie in her uniform and glancing down at her own.

Julie grinned. 'Place belongs to some friends of mine. They won't be in. It's fine, I come and go all the time.' She held the gate open for Gill.

They made their way down a gravel path, past a chicken coop, a vegetable patch, and what looked like a series of beehives - Gill was a city girl, hopelessly, but she thought that's what the white and green boxes were. At the end of the path was a stable, behind which stretched an expansive field where three horses grazed, and on their right was a smaller training yard where another stood, front leg bandaged and looking rather forlorn until Julie lead Gill in that direction.

'Hello, girl,’ Julie called, and the horse's ears pricked up, head turning. Julie approached another gate, unlatched it. 'Coming in?' she asked Gill.

Gill had never been particularly comfortable around horses, didn't have much experience with them. She remembered the rag-and-bone man with his horse and cart, from her childhood, and she and her brother had been to the races a few times with their Dad (watching him spend money they didn't have while Mum worked her weekend job), but Gill had never had any desire to get closer than that. When she was assigned to crowd control teams on football weekends, she always kept her distance from the mounted officers. They made her nervous, these animals who were taller than her, but Julie was looking at her expectantly, clearly at ease, and Gill Prescott wasn't _afraid_ of things. She ignored her anxiety and ushered herself through the gate. 

Julie made a clicking sound with her tongue, and the horse approached, walking normally - or what seemed like normal to Gill's eyes - despite the bandaged leg. Julie reached out, the horse nudged her palm with its nose, and Julie smiled at Gill.

'Gill, this is Ariadne. Ariadne, this is my friend Gill from work.' Julie scratched the mare's nose, glanced up at Gill, and her expression was eager but tentative, searching Gill's. 'She's the reason I've needed so many mornings off, lately. Sprained leg, my fault - I pushed her too hard in a polo match a few weeks ago. Feel terrible about it.'

Gill found herself staring, not quite sure what to say. Never in a million years would she have guessed that Julie was a horse person, had an interest this far removed from their job cleaning up the roughest parts of Manchester, would be comfortable in this setting. 'You play polo?' was the response that came out of her, incredulous.

'I do.' Julie fussed with Ariadne's mane. 'Have since school.'

'God, where did you go?' Gill asked, smiling. 'St Trinian's?'

'Manchester High School for Girls,' Julie answered, speaking to the horse.

A silence followed while Gill took that in - Julie Dodson, private school girl. She broke it moments later with a laugh. 'Get you, Lady Muck. Didn't know I was riding around with Princess Diana.'

It was meant as banter, a little joke like the ones they threw at each other all the time, but when Julie looked up at her, Gill realised it had been absolutely the wrong thing to say. Her friend's eyes were wide, hurt, and far too late Gill realised what all this was. This wasn't just an afternoon interlude, it was an admission, a plea for acceptance. Julie's accent, her manner, none of it matched up with what Gill would expect from a former private school girl, which probably meant she had intentionally unlearned it all after leaving. Even so, she'd seen fit to share this thing with Gill, an important part of herself, something that mattered, and Gill had thrown jokes back, blindly ignoring the signs of approaching danger until she impaled herself on her own wit.

'Shit,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

'I'm not a princess,' Julie said, sounding small.

'I know. I'm an arse.' Time for an admission of her own, Gill thought. 'I've never been this close to a horse before. They make me nervous. Can I, how do I…?' She reached out a hand, wanting to know now, wanting to understand, hoping Julie would take it for the acceptance it was.

She seemed to. Smiled and beckoned Gill closer, took a step to the side. 'Let her sniff your hand,' Julie said, 'she won't bite. She's pretty even tempered. Polo ponies need to be.' Gill did, nerves fluttering, hearing a strange little laugh come out of herself as the horse's breath tickled her fingers. She glanced at Julie, who was smiling even more now, encouraging. 'Now give her neck a scratch. Neck's a good place to start, neutral, but she loves having her cheeks scratched, too.' Gill moved her hand slowly up to touch Ariadne's neck, ran her fingers over it. She was silkier than Gill expected, but the hair was shorter than it looked, grazing against Gill's palm. She applied fingernails, first a gentle scratch and then a firmer one, and the horse cocked her head to the side, pressing into Gill's hand. This time, Gill's laugh was delighted, and she looked over at Julie, who was watching them with a look that was half smug and half close to tears.

Gill recognises that moment for what it was, now - the first time Julie had made herself vulnerable, shared something that she thought might change their friendship forever. It's the same look she's wearing now, bracing, and Gill can't fathom why.

"Slap, what you could you _possibly_ say that would ruin everything?" Gill asks, but as soon as she says it she thinks she knows, and now the the question is in the air and so is a tension that makes her fingers tingle, sends a wave of _something_ crackling through her. If this is a secret, Gill wants to hear it, even if it does change everything. She watches Julie intently.

Julie hesitates, heaving a breath, but under Gill's gaze seems to make a decision. "Well, speaking of futures, I could tell you that I've thought for a while now that waking up looking at you would be the best way I could imagine my own."

Gill can feel Julie's fingers trembling against her skin, can feel the blood in her head heating up her face. Her mind stumbles into and over thoughts and feelings, tries to sort through them, gives up. Her instincts were right, though, felt this coming, and she listens to them, hoping they keep her on track. If she's honest with herself, she thinks 'instinct' is just another word for observations unacknowledged, and if that's the case then she has noticed this thing, over and over, and perhaps she refused to acknowledge it because she enjoyed it too much to risk losing it.

But the risk has been taken now. Gill searches for words. "You haven't ruined anything," she says, eventually. "Maybe I've been waiting to hear you say that for a while."

Julie stares at her for a long time, and when she speaks again, her voice is half incredulous and half fragile. "Are you pissed? Because I'm not having anything to do with this conversation, if you are."

Gill feels a flicker of irritation, a flicker of amusement. Glances at the glass in her hand then reaches across to deposit it on the coffee table. "No, I'm not pissed. Maybe I'm braver than usual, more ready to admit things, but I'm _not_ pissed. Are you?"

"No. Want me to spell my name backwards?"

Gill laughs. "You probably learned to do that when you were five." _Julieanne Charlotte Rose_ , Gill knows, another family inheritance that she's shared with Gill but would go to her grave before admitting to anyone else.

"Six, actually," Julie says, and a cautious but more natural smile re-emerges on her face. "My first party trick." It grounds them, the banter. They've thrown everything else into the air but they're still them, still capable of this effortless back and forth. That feels important to Gill, and it seems to make Julie more comfortable as well.

"Well, we're just going to have to take each other's word for it then, aren't we?"

"Suppose so," Julie says, then leans forward over Gill's legs to set her own glass down as well. Glances sideways. "So what happens now?" She leans back again, settles, lets her fingers slide up a little further so they're under Gill's trouser hem. "Just to be clear, this is not you've been waiting to hear because you already had an inkling, and it's fine but not reciprocated, is it? That's not the conversation we're having?"

"No." Gill swallows. "It's not."

"Then what is it, exactly? I'm going to need you to be a little clearer about what it is you want." Julie's voice is steady now.

Gill takes a breath, weighs her words. "I didn't know, not really. Maybe I noticed the tension, a bit, but up until tonight I've told myself that that's a normal part of this sort of friendship. But it isn't, is it? I've been in a funny place, a closed-off, scaredy-cat sort of place, ever since Dave, and it's taken me 'til now to realise that I like it, the tension. With you." That doesn't quite answer Julie's question, though, so Gill continues. "As for what I want, well, waking up with you seems like a nice thing to put at the top of the list."

Gill thinks of countless other moments exactly like this one, the two of them slipping away early from a work function or the din of a crowded pub, wanting less of the society of everyone around them and more of each other's company. She thinks of late night phone calls from Bristol or London or Kent, when she was with the Crime Faculty, calling Julie instead of Dave when she wanted to share the stories of her day with someone - phone calls that sometimes pulled Julie away from her own partners, sometimes right out of bed. They've been orbiting each other for years, it seems to Gill, the respective gravities of their lives holding them close while keeping them in check, but now there's nothing else between them, and the prospect of collision feels both inevitable and welcome.

Julie smiles again now, and Gill's known her for thirty years but she's never seen that smile before, long and lazy and cryptic. The sight of it sets something warm and tingly quivering in Gill's stomach. It's like earlier, at the pub, only now it's less uncomfortable and more exciting. "And?" Julie asks, fingers massaging Gill's calf. "Is it just tension you like, or are you a woman of action?"

Gill's mouth curls in a smile of her own, and she wonders if hers is just as new to Julie, if it causes the same stomach-flutter. She wonders if Julie finds this as extraordinary as she does, a situation so familiar but so suddenly new, charged with an energy that's never been present before. She doesn't want to ask, though, finds she likes not knowing. It opens up the possibility of discovery. "Both are nice," she answers, letting the pleasure of that thought sound in her voice. "Does action mitigate tension?"

"Depends on the action," Julie says, with a slow blink.

Gill gazes at Julie for a few moments more, then she's in motion, pulling herself up and sliding across the settee, rearranging her limbs so it's no longer her feet in Julie's lap but her whole self, thighs settling over knees.

"How's this, then?" she asks, letting her arms fall either side of Julie's broad shoulders, wrists resting against the back of the settee. She wriggles again, making herself comfortable, feeling the heat of Julie's thighs against hers even through their layers of clothing. Julie makes a noise, rumbling and hoarse, and it occurs to Gill that rendering Julie Dodson inarticulate is something she'd like to do a lot more of.

"Mm," Julie manages, a moment later. "Still plenty of tension."

Gill threads her fingers into Julie's hair, tugs her head back. When she kisses her, it's warm, breath mingling but lips only slightly parted. Gill takes her time, lingers, enjoying how new it feels to learn the shape of Julie's lips, but also the familiarity, that sense of two things that fit together finally sliding into place and locking.

"And now?" she breathes, when she eventually breaks away. She looks down at Julie, who blinks, heavy-lidded, but stares up her with eyes full of light.

Her smile is crooked, as if Gill left it that way. "Is this the part where I remind you I'm a woman, straight girl?"

"God yes," Gill's voice is a breathless laugh. "Remind me."

And Julie's arm is curling around her waist and pressing urgently into the small of her back, tugging her close enough to feel the soft curves of belly and breasts against each other. Gill's mouth descends again, and this time it's hot rather than warm, with Julie's other hand coming up to curl around the back of Gill's neck. This time Gill learns what Julie tastes like, and also that her tongue is far from inarticulate after all.

"Jesus," Julie whispers, when they break apart, breathless. "I'm never going to be able to look at your mouth again without thinking about kissing it, am I?"

"Is that a problem?" Gill responds, tugging Julie's head back a little further to give herself access to the line of her jaw, which she has always, always liked the shape of. She likes the way it feels beneath her mouth even more.

"Everything about you is a problem," Julie grouses, but the noise she makes when Gill finds the spot below her ear tells a different story.

"You know," Gill muses, pulling back just far enough to look down at Julie's face again - it's come up pink all over, very telling, the unwitting honesty of English skin - "I've never kissed a superior officer before. Does this count as climbing?"

Julie laughs, though it's half a groan. "Oh, shut up, you daft cow, and do it again."

Gill does.


	2. Chapter 2

**ii.**

"Julie, Karen Zalinski," comes the voice through the phone.

"Morning, ma'am," Julie greets, trying to ignore the immediate increase in heart rate that occurs every time she hears the Assistant Chief Constable's voice. She's halfway to 'how are you' when Zalinski cuts her off.

"This double murder Syndicate 9 have picked up, how's it looking?" 

The email from Gill about opening up Peverell St is only two hours old. It's from Gill's mobile, and Karen Zalinski is cc'd into it. She knows exactly as much as Julie does, at this point, but if she wants Julie to jump through hoops, Julie will.

"Seems solid so far, ma'am. The witness' information strongly implicated her father as a suspect, and the location of the grave was consistent with her description. DCI Murray's initial report is in order, and Professor Jackson was on her way to the scene as of two hours ago."

"I'd like you to head over to Peverell St as well," Zalinski says. "I want you prepped and in Oldham in time for the evening briefing."

"Me, ma'am?"

"Yes. This case is already high profile, and I'm concerned about this second body that wasn't in the witness statement. I'd like you to go in as SIO on this one, Julie."

 _Oh, Jesus Christ._ "With respect, ma'am, I have every confidence in DCI Murray's ability to handle a large investigation."

"This isn't a question of competence, Superintendent. It's a question of resources. We think it's likely that there may be more bodies the witness didn't know about, and if that turns out to be the case, we want the most senior investigator available to manage the teams, and we'd rather avoid a messy handover when it can be prevented."

"Right, yes, understood."

"I'll leave it to you to arrange things with DCI Murray."

"Certainly, ma'am." _And won't that be an interesting conversation?_

"Keep me informed," Karen Zalinski says, and rings off.

Julie sets the phone down and lets her head fall back against her chair. "Bollocks," she sighs at the ceiling.

 _Not a question of competence,_ Zalinski said, but will Gill see it that way? Will she worry that her team will think this a judgement of her? Gill has always been the most supremely competent person Julie knows, but almost as important to her as getting it right is the appearance of control, and will having her investigation taken over shake that? Julie isn't sure if the fact that it's her stepping in will make it better or worse.

Julie remembers a case they worked in '93, a spree killer who had run rampant in Manchester for a month, leaving bodies across several police districts before he was finally spotted by a civilian and apprehended fleeing the scene of what would have been his sixth murder. Gill and Julie were both experienced DCs by that point, sergeant’s exams under their belts but neither promoted yet, working in different locations but thrown together by the scope and size of the case, three teams and all hands on deck.

It was the first time they'd worked together in years. Gill was heavily pregnant with Sammy, mere weeks away from maternity leave, but she didn't let that slow her down for a second. Day after day, Julie watched her march around town looking for witnesses, even though there was plenty of desk work she could have been doing. 'I'm senior,' she said to her boss, 'and I'm good. We need to catch this one as soon as we can; that won't happen from behind a desk.' She attended the autopsies without looking the slightest bit green.

After the third victim was killed, Julie remembers visiting the crime scene and finding Gill already there with her SIO. As she suited up outside the cordon, she watched Gill moving around the scene. She looked like she had a watermelon packed down the front of her coveralls, and Julie could see that she'd rolled the ankles and sleeves several times - apparently the only suit large enough to accommodate her girth was made for someone several inches taller than her. Even so, she moved like she wasn't carrying what would turn into an eight pound baby in her belly, hopping from one designated walking space to the next and squatting to view the body with only a slightly wider stance than usual. Julie, who always felt ungainly in her suit - like a giraffe with the added hazard of elbows - couldn't help but be astounded by the sight, even envious of her friend's ease.

It wasn't until later, when they'd finished at the scene and managed to slip away to a cafe where they could get a sandwich and a brew, that Julie realised just how much that performance cost Gill.

'Jesus,' she hissed, lowering herself into a chair, 'I'm not sure if it's my ankles or my back that hate me more.' She sighed heavily as her backside hit the seat, her shoulders dropped, and the facade collapsed completely as she reached for her cup of tea and wrapped her fingers around it like one might cradle the holy grail.

Julie, seated opposite, watched all this with eyes widening, suddenly realising that Gill's effortless poise was not so effortless after all. She picked up her own cup of tea and took a sip as she watched her friend recover. Gill held her cup in both hands and did nothing but breathe for several moments, all the strain of the morning suddenly written all over her face.

Julie's first instinct was concern. 'If it takes this much out of you, you can always ask that someone else do the crime scenes, you know.'

Gill looked at her like she'd grown a second head. 'And let Ali go and take the credit for spotting half of what I would? Not likely. He's got his sergeant's exams as well, and Ferguson's retiring a month after I come back from leave. If I slack off now, I haven't got a hope in hell of being promoted when I come back. If I can't handle everything he can with a bump, they'll never believe I can do it with a baby.' Gill's eyes were hard, determined, and Julie knew she was right.

'You've got a stronger will than I have,' she said, and meant it. Julie faced challenges of her own, being an out lesbian trying to climb the ladder, but they were primarily mental - rising above the snide comments and proving them wrong. There had been a few more serious incidents over the years - the most frightening of which had involved Frankie Waddington blocking her way out of an evidence locker and making a series of vile threats about 'turning her around' and 'showing her what real sex was' - but in the end, Julie gave them all the two-finger salute by being better than they thought she was, and she could leave the shit at the office at the end of the day. This, what Gill was taking on, a demanding job as well as a baby? It wasn't something that Julie thought she could do.

'My feet,' Gill decided, breaking into Julie's reverie, 'it's my feet that hate me the most.'

Julie looked at her friend, worn down to the edges from her own dedication, and felt a surge of something hot - admiration, as well as something more that she wasn't in any hurry to define. She set her cup of tea down. 'Give 'em here,' she said, smiling.

'What, my feet?' Gill asked, laughing.

'Yeah,' Julie replied. 'Unless you're worried it'll look like I'm doing something untoward to you under the table.'

Gill snorted. 'At this point, I don't even care if someone comes up and asks me how you managed to impregnate me.'

Julie laughed. They looked the part, actually, in plain clothes and both of them wearing wedding bands, with Julie's short hair and sensible shoes and Gill's more feminine armour of makeup and nail varnish. The thought made Julie feel a little warm in the cheeks, but if Gill noticed, she said nothing. Instead, she shifted in her seat, and a moment later Julie was catching her swollen ankle and easing the shoe off her foot, placing it on a vacant chair before settling Gill's foot into her lap, cradling the ankle in one hand and using the other to massage Gill's instep through the stocking she wore.

'How's that?' Julie asked, glancing up, but Gill didn't answer. Her head had fallen back against her shoulders and her eyes were closed, and she gave a low murmur of approval in lieu of words. Julie let her fingers work up over the ball of Gill's foot, down to her heel, squeezing the swollen ankle gently and sliding her thumb and forefinger back and forth around it.

'God,' Gill muttered eventually, eyes cracking open, 'how are you so good at that?'

Julie smiled. 'What can I say? You're good at making babies and I'm good with my hands, seems in order.'

'Do the other one?' Gill asked, hopeful.

'Nah, thought I'd just do the left,' Julie responded with a smirk.

Gill made a face, half scowl and half pout. 'Oh, shut up. Can't I be pregnant and stupid for five minutes at least?'

Julie could have thrown a quip back, but she didn't, too warmed by the fact that, out of everyone, it was her Gill trusted enough to let her facade down in front of, show weakness to. They'd earned that, Julie supposed, over the years, but it hadn't been until this case began that she'd realised how firmly Gill's mask was in place with everyone else. It felt pretty special, being trusted by Gill Murray.

'Of course you can,' Julie said, easing Gill's shoe back on and waiting for the other foot.

Trusted. It still means a lot, even now that they're doing much more than looking the part. Especially now. Julie hopes that can survive the coming hours, days, intact.

*

Julie arrives at Peverell St just as Gill is preparing to leave. Denise, the CSM, and her team will remain onsite long into the night, but Gill's duties lie elsewhere. Julie is grateful to spot her peeling away her protective gear as she steps out of her car. Kel, one of the floating DCs, is with her, along with the crime scene tech collecting their coveralls into evidence bags of their own.

"Gill," Julie calls, lifting a hand when that head swivels, birdlike, in her direction. Gill smiles, tugging her foot out of the plastic suit, scooping up the bundle and stuffing it into the bag the technician is holding open.

"Hiya, Slap. Big one, here. What brings you?"

Julie can see the light in her eyes, that thrill of the hunt, for want of a better term. She's already thinking ten steps ahead, planning for how she'll direct her team to nail the one responsible for these bodies to the wall, and now Julie has to tell her she won't be doing that after all, at least not in the usual way. This is difficult. Julie could have called ahead, but she'd thought this conversation would be better had in person, only now she's here and Gill is surrounded by the people Julie has to lead from here on, and there's no space to break it to her gently if she wants these people to look to her as the SIO.

"I've been sent over by the Assistant Chief Con. Upstairs is concerned that it might turn out that this case needs more resources than you've got, so they want me to be SIO, with you as deputy. Pre-emptive strike to avoid the takeover later."

There's a beat between words, a fraction of a moment in which Gill's face freezes, her expression turns carefully neutral. It's perceptible enough that Julie's probably not the only one to notice, but in the next moment Gill is breezy and professional, and it would be easy to think you'd imagined it. "Right," she says, tugging the cap off her head and giving her hair a shake. "You'll need briefing, then, because I've called one for the whole team at Oldham in half an hour. Unless you want to push that back?"

"No," Julie says, and does her best to not look like she's searching Gill's face, eyes, for what's hidden underneath. They'll have to find time to talk about this later, trust each other that they'll carve out a moment when they can. "Best not to waste any time. Can you ride with me, back to Oldham? Give me an outline in the car?"

Gill retrieves her things from the crime scene tech, fishes into her bag for her keys and hands them to Kel. "Make your own way back," she tells them, "and make sure Janet and Rob know we're en route."

Once they're buckled into Julie's car, tucked in and pulling away from prying eyes, Julie finds an opportunity. Taps her fingers on the steering wheel. "I didn't ask for this, just so you know. I told Zalinski you were more than capable of running this on your own." She's watching for traffic so she can't watch Gill's face as she replies.

"Of course you didn't, and of course I am. But they want it how they want it, so we'll make it work. We'll have to figure that out later, though, because it's not going to take us long to get back, and there's a lot you need to know. Listening?"

It's enough. It has to be. Gill's right, they don't have time for anything else right now. "Fire away," Julie says, and pushes everything bar traffic and murder out of her head.

*

They get another five minutes after the briefing, and Julie is glad, because they need it. As people melt away to perform the tasks they've been set - or at least to grab tea and prepare themselves for a long evening - Gill heads into her office without a backward glance. Julie follows. She lets the door snick closed behind her, leans against it, waiting for Gill to turn and face her. It's painfully obvious that she's annoyed, was as soon as Julie started speaking in the briefing.

She turns around after a moment. "Was it really necessary for you to cut me off like that?" she asks. Her face is perfectly controlled, no doubt aware of the open blinds, but there's an edge to her voice that could cut glass.

"I think it was," Julie answers, keeping her voice steady and her posture open. "They're your team. They're going to look to you first, for answers, and I needed to establish that this time they need to be looking at me."

"I know that," Gill says, "and I was about to say that that was a good question to turn over to you. Would have, if you hadn't _waved me to silence_."

 _Oh._ "I'm sorry."

"And could you let me finish a sentence, next time? Trust me that I know you're in charge, and I'm not going to take over the conversation? I do have some experience working with other high-ranking officers, you know."

Right. Crime Faculty Gill, the case-closing genius, a coup for her that left the rest of them lagging behind. Julie supposes it would have given her a lot of experience at cooperation, though - probably more than Julie has. She sighs. "I suppose I was a little overzealous. Not as good at sharing as you, used to elbowing blokes out of the way when they try to talk over me. I'm sorry, and I'll keep that in mind, next time."

"Thank you," Gill says, then her mouth curls upwards slightly. "Always liked watching you, elbowing the blokes. Don't like it so much when it's me, but I do like that about you, the strength. Bet Kevin never called her 'Scary Mary' in front of you."

Julie has a smile of her own then, albeit a wry one. "Never said much of anything, in front of me. Think I scared the shit out of him. He did actually show some recall skill, this time, so I think you've been better for him than I was. You don't actually call her that, though, do you? In front of your team?"

"Sometimes," Gill answers. "It's just a nickname. And she is scary, way she throws bodies around."

Julie inclines her head, lifts a shoulder. Mary is a friend, so perhaps Julie's a little protective. Mary can be slightly scary, yes, but something about that sort of nickname - the behind the back kind - makes Julie uncomfortable. "It's always women who end up with those sorts of nicknames, though, isn't it? Godzilla?"

"Mm." Gill's response is a thoughtful noise, but they don't get the chance to discuss casual misogyny in the workplace, because Rob is knocking on the door. Julie moves away from it, giving him space to enter.

"Ma'am," he says, then glances between them like a panicked gazelle, seeming to realise that could be addressing either of them. "Superintendent. I've got the Assistant Chief Con on the line for you. Wants an update."

 _Brilliant_ , Julie thinks, but what she does is thank him, glance at Gill. "Use your phone?"

"Course," Gill answers. "We'll have to get something set up for you. Space for a desk over there, you think?"

"What, I don't get yours?" Julie asks, smiling as she rounds it to pick up Gill's phone.

"Don't push your luck, lady," Gill says, but she's smiling as well as she leaves the office to let Julie contend with her Zalinski-related palpitations in private.

*

"So, are we all right, then?"

It's nearly midnight before they get proper time alone. Julie's sent everyone else home to their beds, but she and Gill are still finishing up. Julie still doesn't have a computer so it's mostly Gill writing the report, with Julie half-sitting on the edge of the desk beside her, fielding the occasional question or clarification. They manage about twenty minutes of that before there's a lull in the typing, and Julie has to ask.

Gill lets her hands fall away from the keys, looks up at Julie over the top of her glasses, swivels her chair around slightly. The movement brings her closer, close enough to touch, but they need to practice being careful at work. Julie grips the edge of the desk to stem the desire to reach out, contents herself with a look.

"Of course we are," Gill says. "We did say that we wouldn't let this get in the way of work, didn't we?"

"We did," Julie responds, smiling wryly, "but these things are easier said than done, and I didn't think we'd have to test it quite so soon." It's been a little over three months, and Julie still can't believe it, most days. She watches the smile twitch at the corner of Gill's mouth as she tucks some files inside a folder, and she's not sure whether it's a fiddly pretence of work or if Gill is physically incapable of sitting still in the office. She watches the way Gill's jaw moves as she looks up again, cants her head back just a little more than necessary, exposing her throat, and she's not sure whether it's unconscious or deliberate. These and a hundred more things every time they see each other - every time they make time, which is not nearly as often as either of them would like - things she's been seeing for years but never noticed before, never attached meaning to in quite the way she does now. They're as comfortable as ever but they're also still circling each other, feeling things out, and it's exciting but fragile. Julie hopes it will stand up to this.

"Are you worried there'll be a blow-up in the office?" Gill asks, eyebrow twitching. "That I'll have a tantrum over the way you say something?"

Julie chuckles. "No. More that you're better at this than me, that I come in like a bulldozer, and I don't want to be that way, with you."

Gill smiles. "Well, you are bossy, I'll give you that." She cocks her head to the side, though, looks at Julie in that assessing way she has. "But if you're worried about me taking it personally, don't be. If it bothers me, I'll bring it up like I did today, and we'll work it out. I hope that didn't make you think I can't take direction, because I can, when it's important." And if there's a subtle musical note in that statement, an insinuating lilt, Julie does her best to ignore it, definitely not thinking about other moments in their recent history where Gill has proven exceptionally good at taking direction.

"And when it's not important," Gill says, continuing with barely a pause, "back off? I know what you're used to, the top-down model, and that is necessary, it gets things done, but I don't think it works so well when people's rank and experience are closely matched. Why do you think Zalinski asked you to do this, specifically? More than likely, because she knows you're not so long out of the SIO job that you've forgotten how to do it, and because she knows we'll work well together as a team. We both know the job, we know each other's strengths when it comes to dividing up the duties, and we communicate well. That's going to be our strength, as long we let it be. The big decisions are yours, I won't stand in the way of those - I might not be as forgiving of Helen Bartlett as you're willing to be, but it's your case so it's your call - but there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't approach this the same way we'd approach anything else."

"Yeah," Julie says, nodding. And there's a certain irony in Gill being the one to articulate it, but if Julie can learn cooperation from Gill even while she's in the position of authority, she's not too proud to do that. "Yeah," she says again.

"And if we mess up, if you get in your steamroller or I get territorial, we'll talk about it, and we'll be big enough people not to take it home with us. We'll be fine," Gill says, the last note emphatic but gentle, and then she seems to hesitate. Julie can see her working her way through a thought before voicing it. "Do you want to stay at my place, for the duration? I'm closer, and it might help us draw a line under it, work and home?"

Home. It's a large word, a four letter word if ever there was one, and Julie feels the same hesitation, wondering if they're ready for that. Gill's made her mind up, though, wouldn't have suggested it if she hadn't, and what will it mean, if Julie declines?

"Okay." Her voice comes out as barely more than a breath, and Gill's eyes meet hers, and it seems they both feel the weight and the promise of it. Julie's fingers curl away from the desk, just the barest hint of reach, and Gill's eyes flick across the office before she responds, lifting her own hand to curl her fingers around Julie's.

"Okay," she says, and smiles. Their fingers slide apart a moment later. "I'll finish up here. Give me an hour to get it all in order, and I'll meet you there?"

"An hour," Julie agrees, sliding off the desk. "Sammy not home?"

"Night shift for the rest of the month," Gill answers, and this time Julie does allow herself to notice the secretive little curl of lips - those are most certainly her lover's lips, not DCI Murray's.

"I'll see you at yours, then," Julie says. _After I've had a shower, and put on a fresh pair of knickers, and allowed myself to panic for five minutes, because this will either be the best idea we've ever had, or the worst_.

She departs with something of a bemused smile on her face, crackling with a nameless sort of energy.


	3. Chapter 3

**iii.**

They've slipped apart in sleep, but no sooner has Gill stirred enough to turn the alarm off than a warm arm slides around her middle, and Julie's sleepy voice makes an incoherent noise into her hair. Gill's awake immediately, as always - like a bird with the dawn, Julie says, while she is more of a bear, all soft but growly until she gets her morning hit of caffeine. Even so, Gill arches back into the touch, enjoying the warmth and the remembered but still not quite familiar sensation of waking up with someone.

"Big day," she whispers. "We shouldn't linger."

"Mmf," comes Julie's response, as she tugs Gill closer. "Too warm. Not moving." Julie's hand splays across Gill's middle, fingers curling, a clumsy sort of caress, but one that still makes a curl of heat shimmer through Gill's body. She enjoys this sort of unfamiliar, too - touch new enough to send desire sparking through her at any time, regardless of how well satiated she was the night before. She wants to kiss Julie against the wall, the bed, the kitchen counter. Wants to take her, be taken, in all of those places and maybe the shower as well, and who knew she had this in her? That _they_ had it in them? Not for the first time, Gill is full of the contradiction of wishing they could have had this years ago, could have avoided all the times when things were hard, and being grateful, glad, that things have worked out exactly as they are, both of them a little more self-aware, a little less volatile, than they were when they were younger.

Gill's hand stretches back, curls around Julie's hip and pulls her close, but really, she didn't set the alarm early enough for all that (something to remember in future, perhaps), and also she needs the loo.

"Better move," she murmurs, rolling and half dislodging Julie's arms, "mustn't be late. Don't want to get bollocked by the boss; she's scary."

Julie's eyes are half-closed, her face crinkled with sleep, but her lips twitch into a crooked smile at Gill's words. "She's forgiving, but only if you kiss her good and proper."

"Oh, is that how it is?" Gill murmurs, smoothing a strand of mussed hair away from Julie's face and raking her fingers back through it. "Bought with a kiss. You sell yourself short, I think."

Gill does, though, leans down and kisses her, long and lazy. Julie's hand curls around her shoulder, and by god Gill wants to stay in bed, but the world won't wait. "Going for a shower," she whispers when she breaks away.

By the time she gets out, Julie's properly awake, robe-wrapped and cup of tea in hand, under the covers with her iPad on her knee. "Made you a brew," she says, nodding toward the mug sitting on the dresser. There's a saucer resting on top to keep the warmth in.

"When do you move in?" Gill asks, smiling as she picks it up.

"Oh, I'm only domestic when it helps me get in your pants," Julie responds, draining her own mug before sliding out of the bed and heading for the shower herself.

When Gill opens the wardrobe to select her clothes for the day, she can't help but smile to see the other side full of Julie's pant-suits and shirts, the two pairs of pointy heels parked beneath them. She knows this isn't permanent - truth be told she's not sure she's ready for it to be permanent, not yet - but she does like the sight of their things casually occupying shared space. This isn't the first time they've shared Gill's home - she remembers three weeks after she first kicked Dave out, Julie bringing a bag and setting up camp in the spare room, being there where Dave wasn't to make sure Sammy got off to school okay and Gill remembered to eat. This isn't even the first time they've shared a bed. Gill remembers a hotel in Portsmouth, finding out she was pregnant again six months after joining the Crime Faculty; remembers losing it on the job and crying over the phone to Dave, who was useless, then Julie, who got straight in her car and drove clear across the country to be with Gill for the night. She bundled Gill into bed, stroked her hair and held her while she shook, while all the irrational demons of _did I not want this enough, was I too concerned about what it meant for my job_ threatened to eat her alive. There was a desperate, needy sort of intimacy in all that, but this - shirts and skirts hanging next to each other and discarded on the floor after they've peeled them off each other - this is not something they've had before, and Gill rather likes it.

She chooses her outfit, dresses, and is in front of the bedroom mirror doing her makeup when Julie emerges from the shower. The task takes Gill considerably longer than usual with Julie moving back and forth semi-clothed through her field of vision, here buttoning her crisp business shirt over silky black bra, there sitting on the bed to slip a short, sheer stocking over her toes in preparation for shoes, all rather pleasantly distracting.

"Do you want breakfast?" Gill asks as she finishes, right in time for Julie to need the mirror. Julie doesn't always eat breakfast, but today she flashes Gill a grin.

"Definitely. I'm ravenous after last night."

A quirk of the eyebrow and a curl of the lips. "Glad to know I'm good for your appetite. Any requests?"

Julie is unzipping her makeup bag, glances up. "Full fry-up? Eggs Benedict?" She smiles. "Whatever you're having is fine."

"Good," Gill responds, heading for the door. "Can tell you've never lived with a teenage boy. Bacon has a shelf life of about two hours." She takes both their empty mugs with her to the kitchen.

Gill's usual is yoghurt with muesli and fresh fruit. She sets two bowls, two spoons on the bench and flicks the kettle on again as she prepares the meal. Julie appears as she's rinsing the fruit - a mix of blue and blackberries, today - and slips past her to where the kettle is starting to boil. She smells like a forest, piney and woodsy and green, and her fingers trail across Gill's back as she moves.

"What is it?" she asks, glancing at what Gill's concocting as she drops teabags into mugs.

"The Gill Murray workday special. Tasty, but entirely uninteresting to young PCSOs up at midday after their night shift."

Julie smiles. "Like espionage, that is. Disguise delicious as healthy, sneak in under cover of dark. Remain undetected by the enemy."

Gill laughs. "You've got it exactly, and that's not even getting into the hidden caches of chocolate and crisps." She spreads the muesli over the yoghurt, tops it off with the fruit and takes the bowls to the table as Julie finishes off the tea. "We'll probably have to go shopping at some point, by the way."

Julie pours milk into the mugs, stirs, speaks over the chime of spoon against crockery. "If this case cracks open like we think it will, and I bring my lads in, I can get one of them to do it, if you like. They're well-trained."

Julie carries the mugs to the table, sets them down and takes the chair opposite Gill, who can feel the amusement on her face. "What, bickering over spiral versus shell pasta is too domestic for you?"

"Prefer animal shapes, myself," Julie replies.

"Child."

"Snob."

Gill sips her tea, picks up her spoon. "Think there's a way of asking a lad to do shopping for both of us without it being a huge flashing roadside billboard advertising our new status? Given that we ostensibly work with detectives, after all."

Julie takes a mouthful of breakfast, nods in approval as she chews. "I think you're underestimating the power of your presumed heterosexuality, but I suppose it would be better to avoid being the gossip."

"Sammy can do it, if we don't have time. Minus the secret stash, obviously." They don't want to be the gossip of the station, but Gill had the necessary conversation with Sammy shortly after all this began, and he took it in his stride, barely batting an eyelid. _As long as you don't talk to me about the sex bits, I'm glad you're happy, Mum. You always made each other laugh, and I've always liked her, so_. He shrugged his shoulders, went back to his Xbox, and that was that. Gill remembers blinking, nodding, leaving the room slightly dazed, but Sammy's been as good as his word. There's been no awkwardness, no sullen silence or whispering to his father; he even joined them for drinks and a stand-up show one night. Gill tries not to be constantly surprised by how proud she is of the man she's managed to raise, but sometimes she really can't help it.

They descend into companionable silence, then, eating their breakfast, and it's not until the plates are rinsed and the teacups drained, until they've both collected their work gear and their separate sets of car keys, that the day really looms large and long in front of them.

"Faces on, then?" Gill asks, standing by the door.

"Just a moment," Julie says, and moves forward. Her arm curls around Gill's waist, tugs her close, kisses her soundly. The thrill arcs through Gill, a surge of heat that warms her to her fingertips, and as their breath mingles for a moment afterward, it seems they're both clinging to it, willing it to sustain them through a difficult day.

"All right," Julie says, releasing Gill, "faces on."

They both take a breath, square their shoulders, and head out the door.

*

It's a day for faces. Julie spends her morning in a press conference with Karen Zalinski, and midday sees them squatting over a third open grave with Mary Jackson, staring at the remains of their seventh victim.

"Just from the size of the pelvis you can see there, I'm willing to say this is another male, and he was probably about the same age as the others."

Gill and Julie sigh simultaneously. Seven bodies, and still no Sheila. Gill stands up and moves away, or as away as she can get within this horrible little hole of a place. A moment later, Julie follows, touches her elbow. "You all right?" she asks.

Gill glances across the room, at the graves and the remains laid out alongside them, shakes her head. "Yeah," she says, aware that that's a contradiction, but it's an apt one. There is nothing all right about this, but she's not about to keel over or anything. "Yeah, I'm all right. Just, they're Sammy's age, aren't they? All of them. And I'm glad they're like this, really - the horror's removed when they're just bones - but I keep thinking about all those parents who lost their sons and never knew what happened. Thirty years, Jesus."

"Yeah," Julie answers, but Gill can tell from her eyes, voice, that she isn't feeling this at all. She's disassociated, like Gill usually is at a crime scene, thinking about how to push this forward, what the next steps are, how to win this one. Gill envies her the focus, but wants her to understand, too. They're standing where the mattress was, before the crime scene technicians took it away. Behind Julie's shoulder, iron rings are fastened to the wall. It's where they think Joe Bevan tethered them, either while he assaulted them or while he killed them - they won't know likely cause of death until Mary's got the remains back to her lab.

"I just," Gill says, gesturing at the wall, at the graves. "Who's going to be held responsible for this? Joe Bevan's already away, he's going to spend the rest of his life inside for killing Eunice. How…?" Her hands ball into fists, press against each other. "How do we make up for all the years they got to spend watching telly and collecting their bloody pensions while seven people rotted in the floor?"

"We can't," Julie says, but her eyes show more of an understanding now. She doesn't let it sound in her voice, though. "Think you're a bit claustrophobic, love. Come on, it's about time we went upstairs and called the troops. Mary, is there anything more you need us for, down here?"

It takes Mary a moment to even register that the question was directed at her. "No," she says, looking up at them. "I'll be here a while. I'm sure you've more pressing things to do than watch me pick bones out of the dirt." She reaches into the grave to retrieve one, and that's all the attention they get.

"Come on, then," Julie says, and leads the way back upstairs.

*

When they get back to the station, Janet and Rob are in watching Rachel's interview with Joe Bevan, so they pop into the observation suite for an update.

"It's slow going," Rob says. "He's got no idea how any of those bodies got there, it must have been Eunice and the girls, that sort of thing."

"Telling, though," Janet adds. "Eunice and Helen and Julie, but not Sheila. Either he had a favourite daughter, or he left her off because in his head she's already dead when all this happens."

Rob nods, glancing at Janet. He looks impressed, like someone who's just learned something, and Gill is pleased. He'll go far if he's willing to learn from those more experienced than him rather than throwing his weight around, and so far there are no signs of that.

"If she was," Julie says, pulling Gill away from the thought, "she wasn't in the cellar. Where've you put her?" She peers at the screen, lips pursed.

"If she's in the house, we'll know soon enough," Gill says.

Rob glances at the notes he's made in the book in front of him. "We've got Gerry McGonagall coming in in a few hours. Who should sit in on that one?"

"I will," Julie says, not missing a beat, and Gill feels her head turn, eyebrow arch.

"Gerry McGonagall? Why?" She asks before it even occurs to her not to. It's not a very important interview, in the scheme of things, but it's not up to Gill to question the SIO's motivations, and she regrets it instantly, trying to fill the following beat of silence with the right kind of apologetic expression, not wanting to draw any more attention to the moment than she already has. Rob's oblivious, noting Julie's answer down, but Gill sees Janet's head come up, watching.

Julie's face tightens, but when her eyes meet Gill's it seems she sees the apology in her eyes, because she looks away again, flips her hands, slips them under her arms as she folds them.

"I'd like to know as much about Helen Bartlett as possible," she says, "since I've recommended she not be charged." Her voice is confident but her body language is out of sync with it, and Gill feels even more awkward knowing that if anyone else had asked that question, they'd have got a terse response at best.

"Right," Gill says, attempting a smooth recovery. "Of course. Is there anywhere I need to be, Rob?"

"Not specifically," he answers, consulting his notes again.

"I'll be upstairs making a dent in our mountain of paperwork, then."

"Right," all three of them answer. Rob and Julie are watching the screen, where Joe Bevan fumbles to answer another of Rachel's probing questions, but Janet's eyes meet hers for a moment before she steps out of the room, and her face has curious interest written all over it.

*

_That's how they'll get away with it, that failure of your imagination_.

Gill has to get out of her office. Moments after Julie departs, Gill pushes her chair back as well, slips out her door and down the corridor, as fast as she can without running.

It's cool in the stairwell, cool and quiet and empty. Gill wraps her hands around the bannister, lets it earth her. She feels hot in the cheeks - anger, something else - takes a few deep breaths to calm down.

She'll forgive Julie, Gill decides that right then. She was probably fresh off the phone with someone giving her a bollocking, asking questions that neither of them could answer. Gill can forgive her those hastily spoken words, quickly retracted, but it doesn't solve the larger problem, that there is someone on Gill's team she can't trust, someone she should have spotted long before now.

Who? Gill doesn't make mistakes, not at work. Doesn't misjudge people, and yet here is the evidence that she has. Her first thought is Rob, the unknown quantity, but that's not fair, and that tidbit about the prostitute is from months ago. When would he have had time to dig up the minor detail of an alibi from a months-old case? No, this is someone who's been with her syndicate the whole time.

It's so far from what she needs, to be worrying about this on top of everything else, that she nearly laughs. She feels it bubbling in her, a ridiculous hysterical cackle, but the urge cuts off sharply when the stairwell door opens behind her and Janet bustles through.

"Boss," Janet says, stopping short. "Everything all right?"

Gill turns to face her, although one hand stays anchored around the stair rail. "Yeah," she says, "just needed some air, is all."

"What was all that about, just now?" Janet jerks her head in the general direction of the office, which tells Gill that the entire team heard at least part of her exchange with Julie. Wonderful.

"You look like you were in a hurry somewhere," Gill says, not wanting to keep Janet from work.

"Heading downstairs," she says. "There's a bloke down there who says he lodged with the Bevans back in the 70s. He's been here two hours, though, and he's drunk, apparently, so he'll keep for another thirty seconds. What's up?"

Gill hesitates. It's not something she should be sharing with the team, but the day she can't trust Janet Scott is the day the world comes to an end. "We've got a leak," she says. "Someone's been talking to the press."

Janet's eyes widen. "Jesus. One of ours?"

"Has to be," Gill answers. "Helen Bartlett's prostitute? Who else would know?"

Janet shakes her head. "I can't... Who would...?"

"Asking myself the same question," Gill says, with a sigh. She draws herself up in the next moment, though. "It's all right, we'll get to the bottom of it. It's just the last thing I need, on top of..." She trails off.

"On top of taking orders from your friend?" Janet asks, with that knowing little half-smile of hers. "Or..." She searches Gill's face. "Is there something else, there? You seem different with each other lately."

Gill cants her head back, eyes her friend with a slightly narrowed gaze. "You don't miss much, do you, Miss Marple?"

"Well, I was a bit surprised when she didn't have a sarcastic rejoinder for you earlier."

"Oh," Gill says, "she's well and truly made up for that, believe me. She'll be hearing about that, don't you worry."

Janet smiles. "I bet. Don't envy you, though. It can be complicated, working together."

Yes, Janet would know all about that, wouldn't she? "It's fine. Temporary. We'll get through it."

Janet doesn't respond, watches Gill, an amused sort of light in her eyes. "So does that mean you're playing for the other team now? Should we expect to see you wearing plaid in future?"

Gill laughs. "God, I don't know what it means. Start talking about that and I'll keep you here for half an hour." She takes her hand off the banister, thoroughly grounded by Janet now, waves toward the stairs. "Go on, off with you. Go forth and bring me something I can use to convince our fearless leader that Helen Bartlett isn't a puppy in need of rescue."

Janet's started to move, but she stops at Gill's words, turning back. The amusement is gone from her eyes, replaced by another expression entirely. "You're really not happy with this calling her a witness bit, are you?"

Gill sighs. "Thirty years, those bodies were down there. Imagine all the parents who would be sleeping easier now, if she'd just said something. They've only skeletons to bury. Someone has to answer for that pain."

Janet looks at Gill the way she looks at people in interviews, like she can see into their soul. "Should it be Helen, though?" she asks, and vanishes down the stairs.

*

Gill feels vindicated after the information Janet presents at the briefing - Helen Bartlett maybe not so innocent after all - but Julie is sombre as they retreat back into the office. Preoccupied. She sinks down into the chair behind the desk they've set up for her - today outfitted with a computer and a phone of her own - but doesn't turn toward it, instead pressing the tips of her fingers together and staring at nothing.

"Hey," Gill says, slipping into her own chair, "it's not too late to change your recommendation, if it turns out Helen had more to do with what went on in that house than we thought."

Julie looks up, shakes her head just slightly. "I'm not sure I want to. Not sure I buy it. Eleven, twelve years old they must have been, at best, if we're presuming Michael was killed last. Even if they did participate in some way, we can't call that willing." Julie shudders.

"Maybe not in the assault," Gill says, "but if they had a part in the murders..."

Julie's eyes are hard when they meet Gill's. "You keep thinking about these girls you've got in court. They acted of their own volition, robbing that woman and killing her. It was entirely contained, no outside influence, their responsibility. But if you're eleven and your mother or father hands you a knife and says cut this person, that's not the same thing. If you've been abused, mentally, physically, sexually, for years, how can you have any sense of what's right in that situation? You'd be entirely focused on survival."

Gill sighs, feels her lips tighten. It's complicated, yes, she knows that, but she can't get behind this idea of innocence Julie has. "Why wouldn't you tell someone? A teacher, a friend's parent, anyone? I can't understand that."

"Be glad you're lucky enough not to," Julie says.

Gill peers at Julie for a few moments, doesn't reply because she's in danger of saying something insensitive and personal. No, Gill doesn't know about being scared to go home every night, but she knows more than Julie does about growing up with not enough, or only just enough, and living in the kind of domestic situation that creates. She knows about working hard, not giving up, dragging herself up out of it until she'd created the life she wanted. She knows that was a difficult thing to do. She'd done it, though, and people did every day. Having a rough life was not an excuse for violent crime.

Julie's thoughts seem to have gone off in a different direction, though, a change of subject that Gill is grateful for. "I wish they'd stop saying 'Julie and Helen' in the same breath like that, by the way. Does my head in, every time." She fingers the gold rings on her left hand.

"You think that's strange?" Gill asks, with a smile. "You should try working with Dave."

Julie snorts. "I'll pass on that, thanks." Seemingly on the subject of partners and work, though, she looks at Gill again. "I'm sorry about before, too. Again."

Gill remembers Julie's Helen, the first girlfriend she ever met. It had been a serious relationship, the kind you have in your early twenties when you've emerged from school and found a job and started to realise how paired-up the world is, and eagerly sought out your own experience of that for the first time. It had ended around the same time as Gill's own very similar relationship with a man called Jack (probably a good thing that one had gone, a few years of people making nursery rhyme jokes were enough for a lifetime). Going out drinking together when they were both newly, not entirely happily single had been some of the most formative months of Gill and Julie's enduring friendship.

'Fuck it, though,' Gill remembers slurring one night, one or two (or five) too many pints under her belt. 'We've got the job, the career, going to make it to the top, who the hell needs anything else?'

'Cheers to that!' Julie responded, lifting her glass in salute. 'Marry the job! Mrs Detective Chief Superintendent, that's how it should be.'

Gill laughed, raised her glass. She wasn't really serious, though at the time the idea was appealing. Later that night, though, once the booze wore off enough to make them tired but not quite enough to make them sane, Julie let her head fall onto Gill's shoulder and said 'We should, you know, marry the job. I've got the rings and everything. My mother left me hers in her will, and I'm never going to find a bloke like she hoped. I should do something with them before my sister Kate asks to have them, greedy bitch. There's two. You want to marry the job with me?'

'All right, yeah,' Gill answered, though really she expected the conversation to be forgotten. A few months later, though, they returned to Julie's after a retirement party for one of the senior officers at their nick, and after they'd spilled onto the settee for a while, Julie rose and retrieved a small box from a drawer, told Gill to sit up. When she did, Julie crawled back on, opened the box to show Gill two gold rings, one smaller than the other.

'I had it resized for you,' she said, taking the larger ring and extending her hand so Gill could take the second. It was a sudden change in mood, the lightness of the evening turned serious, but it was an appropriate night for it, since they'd just watched one of their mentors farewell a fulfilling career.

'They were your Mum's?' Gill asked as she picked up the smaller one, laying it in her palm and feeling strange about it, like it should have felt heavier for that weight, like this wasn't hers to take.

'Yeah,' Julie said, smiling in an earnest, hopeful way. 'I want you to have it, though. We'll be in it together, married to our work.' She slipped the ring onto her left hand, held it up to the light. 'Mrs Detective. Well, eventually, anyway. I'll get there.'

'Should you kiss your warrant card? Say some vows?' Gill asked, smiling.

'After you,' Julie said, nodding at Gill's hand.

The mirth went out of Gill, then. She took a breath, looked down at the gold band in her palm, and suddenly the air in the room seemed thicker, warmer than before. Perhaps part of her knew that it meant more to Julie than marrying the job, that if she took it they'd be making a pledge to each other as well. Certainly she knew that things were changing, that two weeks earlier she'd gone on a date with Dave Murray and she sort of, maybe, really liked him. Whatever it was she knew for sure, she definitely couldn't do it, and when she looked up at Julie again her hands were shaking, and all of it was written in her eyes.

'Slap, I…' she whispered, a sentence she couldn't finish.

Julie smiled, though, a little sad but still warm. 'It’s all right,' she said. 'Put it on me. It'll fit on my pinkie.' She held out her hand, and Gill, still trembling a bit, slid the ring onto her little finger, where it fit snugly.

'Mrs Detective,' Gill said, and Julie's fingers curled around her hand.

'For my Mum,' Julie whispered, 'who died before she knew that her eldest daughter was a great big dyke. I hope I can be as dedicated to police work as she was to family.'

Gill remembers hugging her, then, all awkwardness forgotten. Julie has worn the rings ever since.

"It's all right," Gill says, smiling at her now. "You've forgiven me for more."


	4. Chapter 4

**iv.**

The alarm goes off far too soon for Julie's liking. She groans, reaches out for Gill, refuses to open her eyes.

Gill sounds groggy herself, this morning. "God, how did I get here? I don't remember going to bed."

Julie growls to test her voice, croaks out: "You fell asleep on me, right at the end of your show. You walked to bed, but I didn't think you were awake. Far too docile."

Gill gives a grunt of her own that could pass for a laugh. "How late were you up?"

"Too late," Julie mutters, feeling it right down to her bones. She'd managed to wrangle a department laptop from the IT lads who'd installed her desktop the previous day ( _shh, Gill, look, we're in the presence of a mythical creature_ ), and at the end of the long day she'd convinced Gill that it was _her_ turn to do the paperwork, Gill had done enough. They'd come home and she'd set up camp on the settee, working while Gill snuggled into her shoulder and watched _Downton Abbey_ \- a harsh penance for sharp words, Julie thought, but one she was willing to pay. It hadn't been until close to three that she'd finished what she needed to and coaxed Gill, by then fast asleep, curled up against her like a cat, into bed. She's going to pay for the lack of sleep all day, she knows, but needs must.

Gill squeezes her thigh. "Sleep for another ten minutes," she murmurs, rolling to plant a kiss against Julie's cheek. "I'll wake you when I'm out of the shower."

Julie is only too happy to oblige.

*

They have coffee in the car - Julie's need for caffeine today is stronger than tea can provide - and then they're at the morgue with Mary for most of the morning. After that, it's Peverell St again, viewing the rather grisly discovery in the floorboards, and by the time that's over Julie really needs to sit down, so she's grateful to return to the station and the more banal task of leading the push to identify the remaining victims from the cellar.

"I'll be in the exhibits room if you need me," she tells Gill.

Oldham's exhibits room is more of a cupboard, full of shelves for storage and not a lot of desk space. There is one free wall, though, and yesterday Julie tasked Lee, the exhibits officer, with going out and procuring the largest magnetic whiteboard he could find. He's come through spectacularly. When Julie enters the room, it's hung like a blank canvas, taking up almost all the available space, and there are brand new markers and a box of multi-coloured magnet pins in its tray. Julie takes a deep, satisfied breath. It's one of the things she misses most about her own office, Gill's lack of a space dedicated to the spreading out of ideas, seeing the big picture.

Identifying the Peverell St bodies is not Julie's primary role in this investigation, but it is something she wants to have a hand in, start the team off thinking about, especially since Rob is so green and Janet's tenure as acting sergeant didn't include a case this large. Unlike Gill, whose skill is in the connecting of details, following individual ideas to insightful conclusions (what made her so good in the Crime Faculty, without a doubt), Julie is a big picture thinker, a collector of information and stories. It couldn't have been more apparent than it was in the car this morning, Gill honing in on the detail of the graves and order of burial, while Julie's head was full of all the information Mary had given them: the ages and heights of the victims, injuries and discernible physical characteristics - here an old broken leg, there a heavy brow bone. Julie could never have whittled all that down as quickly as Gill had, branched off tangentially to burial order, but big picture thinking is its own skill, and this - wading through the sea of information from the bodies, the tip-line and the photos from the house - is where it will come in most useful.

Julie opens a series of boxes and file folders on the desk, begins work. She starts with what they have, the bodies, now reassembled and photographed with the restraints as close to the positions they were in in situ as possible. Julie sticks each unidentified body to the board, uncaps a marker and notes down all the relevant details about each. She uses Mary's report but finds she barely needs it; all of the information is still in her head, there at a thought. She's always had a good memory capacity, one of the things, her braver colleagues have told her, that makes her occasionally terrifying. It certainly makes her impatient, she knows, probably one of the main problems she had with Kevin, asking him what he was up to and watching him fumble for his notes, stammering, barely able to keep up with the team.

As she covers the board with information, moving on from the victims to a selected group of missing person reports she wants to use as examples to demonstrate the kind of thinking she's looking for, Julie finds herself wishing that there was someone to _catch_ in this case. Not for the reasons Gill does - the law will hold Joe Bevan accountable, and that will have to be enough for the victims' families. Julie thinks it's heinous, what the press is doing to Helen Bartlett, and the fact that Gill agrees with them, at least on some level, bothers her more than she wants to admit. No, Joe will answer for his crimes if it's the last thing she does, but Julie almost wishes they were hunting for a killer, just for the pure pleasure it would be to put her head together with Gill's to that end. It's synergy, working with someone like that, and they've been brilliant together before.

Julie remembers, as she's covering the whiteboard with her scrawling handwriting, another time they were brilliant, back when Gill was Crime Faculty and Julie was working a case that stumped her. The Powers That Be weren't ready to authorise the expense of bringing in the review team, or one of Gill's people, but Julie made a late night phone call, and within half an hour Gill was with her, alone in the incident room, saying 'lay it out for me'. She'd been bribed with tea and pastries but was there entirely on her own time, in jeans and a baggy jumper with her hair in a messy bun (she's got enough for Julie to get her fingers in even now, but god, if Gill's longer hair of ten years ago hadn't twisted Julie up in all the most agonizing ways).

'All right,' Julie said, spreading photos and documents across the table. 'Victim is Angelina Nash, sixteen, raped and strangled and found in a roadside ditch, body half covered with branches from a nearby tree. Not found for three days, rain washed away trace evidence. Killed elsewhere, dumped, probably within hours of her death. Rigor hadn't set in when she was dropped, anyway. Can tell that from the way she's lying.'

Gill nodded, studying the photographs. 'Access points?' she asked.

'Road's about it,' Julie said. 'The area behind is private property, no tracks or private roads. Plenty of traffic on the main road, there's a mill a few miles down, but quiet when it's not in operation, between about six and three.'

'Any witnesses on the road? Traffic cameras?'

'Nothing,' Julie said. 'We've made three separate appeals and nothing promising, and the closest traffic cameras are too far away to be useful.'

Gill bit her lip, made a thoughtful face, picked up a number of the reports and some of the crime scene photographs and curled herself into one of the chairs, folded in like no one else in the world would sit, feet on the edge of the seat and knees pressed against the table. Julie worked while Gill read and studied the photographs, pausing occasionally to have her brain picked when Gill asked questions, but more often to just look at her friend, study her while her focus was elsewhere. It wasn't an opportunity Julie got very often, Gill being too sharp by half and the kind of attentive conversationalist who rarely took her eyes off the person she was talking to. But that night she was absorbed in the minutiae of police work, so it was easy to observe her unnoticed. Julie watched the way her teeth worried at her lip as she re-read a paragraph, the way she toyed with her pen after making a note, using it to push a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the way she sipped her tea or nibbled on the end of a pastry without taking her eyes off the page she was reading. Eventually, Julie was doing much more watching than working, even though she knew it was a terrible idea, dangerous in the extreme.

And then Gill looked up. Julie startled, affecting work, but if Gill realised she'd been being stared at, she showed no sign of it, too animated by the thought that had obviously come to mind. 'The branches,' Gill said, 'how did they get there?'

Julie wasn't quite following yet. 'Dragged, presumably. The tree wasn't very far away.'

'But how did they get off it?'

'There was a storm a few nights before she died, big winds. Debris all over the place.'

'Anything else as big as these branches?'

Gill pushed the photograph across the desk to Julie, who considered. 'I don't think so, no, but wouldn't that be why you'd choose them?'

Gill's eyes were alive with energy now. 'Look how green they are. Healthy. Storms usually pull off dead branches, or at least weakened ones. These are solid, fresh. And those photos don't show it very well, but look at the ends of them. They look less like they were torn off than hacked off.'

'With an axe?' Julie asked.

'Exactly. And why do you take an axe with you if you're driving to some random location to dump a girl you've strangled? It doesn't make sense.'

'No.' Julie stared at the picture, puzzled. 'It doesn't.'

'Is it a lumber mill, down the road?'

'No.' Julie shook her head. 'Grain.'

'Hm.' Gill pursed her lips. 'The private property, who owns it?'

Julie leafed through some paperwork, couldn't remember. 'Bloke called Daniel Glover, local farmer.'

'Farmers have axes, and he'd know his property. Wouldn't need a car to dump her, either, which could account for your lack of witnesses on the road. Big bloke?'

Julie shrugged. 'Don't know, one of the lads interviewed him on site. Didn't raise any flags. But you wouldn't need to be big, not really, not if you lived on the property. Could pick your time, use a wheelbarrow, pause for breath as often as you liked.'

'Look into him,' Gill said. 'See what comes up.'

Julie had, and Gill had been right. They'd made an arrest three days later, all because of that, because of some green branches and Gill's ability to draw links between things, pull threads from the tapestries Julie wove in her head and tie them in knots.

Julie has finished scrawling information now, opens the box of photos from Peverell St and begins to sort through them. Some of them are marked with sticky notes on which are written possible dates, names to go with the faces of the people Helen Bartlett remembers. Julie searches for details that might match up with the information they've got, remembers what happened after that night she'd spent studying Gill.

She had burned another relationship that night. Remembers arriving home at 6am after looking into Daniel Glover for hours after Gill left, barely time for a shower and breakfast before she had to head back to work again. Her live-in girlfriend at the time, a fiery Irish lass called Brigid, was furious with her for not coming home, for only calling once to say she'd be late, confronted her in the kitchen and demanded to know where she'd been all bloody night.

'Trying to crack a case. I think I've done it, too.'

' _All night?_ ' Brigid demanded. 'It's six in the fucking morning! You couldn't have come home, left it for today? Was it really _that_ urgent?'

'Ask the parents of the sixteen year-old girl we've got in our morgue,' Julie said, but that wasn't enough of an answer, so she elaborated. 'I needed some help, but the bosses wouldn't authorise it, so I called Gill and she came in on her own time. Couldn't very well leave when she dropped everything.'

It was like waving a red flag at a bull. 'Gill! You spent the night with _Gill_.'

'We were _working_ ,' Julie emphasised, but something, some hint of longing or guilt about the thoughts she'd had while they did must have shown on her face, because Brigid wasn't remotely placated.

'I've had this,' she said. 'I've fucking had it.' She banged a cupboard open, pulled a mug out, hands shaking.

Julie leant against the kitchen countertop, sighed. 'You know this about me, about work. You know how important it is to me, that it's my primary commitment. I've never, ever made a secret of that.'

Brigid slapped the mug down onto the bench, turned on Julie. 'And I've never had a problem with that! I don't mind coming second to your work, but I will _not_ sit here and wait for you while you pine away at the altar of your married fucking friend.' There were tears in her eyes by the end of it, and Julie didn't know what to do with them.

'Don't be absurd,' was what she ended up saying.

'Look at me,' Brigid demanded. 'Look me in the eyes and tell me you don't want her, that you're not waiting for her, hoping one day she'll look up and see you.'

Julie's gut twisted, her fists balled. She shook her head. 'I have to get back to work. We'll talk tonight.'

They hadn't, though. When Julie returned home from work that evening, Brigid was gone, and now, all these years later, Julie can't really blame her. She'd loved Brigid, loved her hard enough but not well enough. Hadn't done right by her. And Brigid had been an insightful woman, had been right. No matter how much of herself she gave to her lovers, how fulfilled she was by them, there had always been a part of Julie that was just for Gill, and the more perceptive women in her life had seen it, or at least felt the lack, and they'd been right to leave.

Julie doesn't know where that leaves her, now. Over the moon, terrified? A bit of both, really, because no one ever tells you what happens after you get what you've always wanted.

*

"I was thinking about you, before," Julie says to Gill later, when she's finished in the exhibits room and they're back in Gill's office, working at their respective desks, organizing and delegating and reporting. She swivels in her seat to look over her shoulder, and Gill smiles without looking away from her work.

"Oh really?" she asks, eyebrow arching. "Two hours in another room and you spend it thinking about me? Anyone would think we were shagging."

Julie smiles. "Was thinking about the night you helped me solve the Angelina Nash murder. You know, I spent most of it watching you work instead of doing anything productive."

"Did you?" Gill asks, a hint of music in her voice. "That's a bit creepy, you know. You're lucky I love you, or I might think you were strange."

Julie's breath catches, and Gill glances at her, just for a moment, then continues tapping away at her computer. "Did you just…" Julie stammers, and then all her words fall away.

"Something wrong with your hearing?" Gill asks, prim as anything, blatantly ignoring Julie's gaze, which must be hot enough to set her on fire, if the way it feels from the inside is anything to go on. She's never said it before, that word, _they've_ never said it, and…

"No, nothing wrong with my hearing," Julie replies. Her voice comes out a low purr, nearly a growl. "Want to bend you over that desk, make you say it again." She focusses on the desire, the heat Gill's words stir in her, because it's easier than thinking about the other things. Safer.

"Too many people," Gill says, as if Julie was seriously considering it. "Windows are a problem." Her eyes flick over to Julie again; Julie smirks in response, adjusts the fantasy.

"For you, maybe. I'm pretty well-hidden here, in this corner. Bet I could move, no one would even notice. Get under the desk, get your knickers off, get my mouth on you, and you'd just have to keep a straight face." God, it's a thought, and she can see the faint trace of colour rising in Gill's cheeks that say it's a good one for her, too. She doesn't break her stride, though, keeps typing, like it's a test.

Julie knows she should return the words, say 'I love you' back, but she doesn't think she can throw them out casually like Gill did. They've been too long inside her, simmering half-denied for a decade, and Julie feels like when she says them the world will shake. Here is not the place for that; she hopes Gill understands.

Whether she does or not, Julie is rescued a few moments later when Rob knocks on the door.

*

There's so much to do once an investigation like this one reaches critical mass, an endless stream of digital paperwork, signing off on requests, sending her own, fighting with budgeting, making sure everyone gets paid and making absolutely certain that every single 'i' is dotted on the criminal paperwork lest some canny solicitor come along and use a single mistake to undermine the whole thing. When Gill and Julie get home, again later than they'd like, they manage a meal, laughter, an hour of forgetting, but after the plates are cleared away Julie is back on the settee with the laptop, checking and re-checking and submitting until her eyes are glazing over.

"You just edited that word three times," Gill says from behind her shoulder, "and it's still spelled wrong."

"Is it?" Julie isn't even surprised that she didn't hear Gill approach. She looks at the word again, fixes it. "Better?" she asks, feeling weight settle on the cushion as Gill leans against the back of the settee.

"That's right. About time you packed it in, though, don't you think? Save the rest for tomorrow and come to bed?" Gill's voice is right by Julie's ear; a hand slips onto her shoulder. "We have to be up again in six hours."

"Six?" Julie protests, though the warmth of Gill's fingers making circles against her collarbone has already taken the fight right out of her. "I can get another two hours in before I _have_ to sleep."

"Not tonight," Gill murmurs, and Julie feels her hair being tugged away from her neck before Gill's mouth presses against the skin behind her ear. "I seem to recall a rather vivid proposal you made this afternoon. You going to follow through on that?" Gill nibbles at her throat, hand sliding down further to splay over her chest, fingertips brushing the top of Julie's breasts.

"That was context dependent," Julie breathes, even as her head falls back, throat arching against Gill's mouth. "Seem to recall you saying something, too."

"Really?" Gill tugs at the top button of Julie's shirt, slips a hand underneath the fabric. "I say all sorts of things when I'm hard at work, must have slipped my mind. You'll have to remind me." Fingers slide along the seam of Julie's bra, down to graze over a nipple, and Gill makes a pleased noise that vibrates against Julie's skin.

Julie slaps the lid of the laptop closed. She pushes it off her, twists in her seat, gets her knees underneath her and turns to face Gill. She wastes no time reaching up, tugs Gill down for a kiss, and it reminds her of that first night snogging on the sofa at her place, the cant of her chin upwards, the smug smile on Gill's face in the wake of it, her entire vision full of this tiny little bird of a woman who somehow takes up all the space in the room.

"Bed," Gill whispers when they break apart, breathless but somehow still managing all the authority of a DCI or a determined mother.

"God, yes," Julie replies, and rises.

She's shed her shirt by the time they make it to the bedroom, discards it just inside the door (house rules; no suggestive trails of clothes in the hallway for Sammy to stumble over when he gets in from work). Closing the door, she reaches for Gill, who is fluffy now, wrapped in a robe. She's had a shower since they got home, while Julie was working, and she's fresh and warm and clean. Julie wraps an arm around her waist and tugs her close, hopes she's not gross by comparison, still in her work gear after the long day. Gill doesn't seem to mind, though, curls her arms around Julie's neck and pulls her down for another kiss, long and hot and full of promise.

"I could barely concentrate this evening," Gill tells her when they break for air. "Kept thinking about having your mouth on me. You'll have to repeat everything they said at the briefing." Her mouth quirks in a smile, and Julie growls.

"Later." She backs Gill toward the bed, grips the cord of the robe and tugs it undone. Underneath, Gill is wearing a black _thing_ made of lace and silk and lust, and Julie makes a strangled, incoherent noise as she pushes the robe off Gill's shoulders so she can get her hands on it and the woman beneath it.

The lingerie is loose around the hips, a silky skirt falling from an empire waist. Julie's fingers fall against it, dragging the fabric across skin as she slides her hands around to cup Gill's arse with both hands, lifting her clean off the floor for just a moment, before they both tumble onto the bed. Julie comes down on top, pinning Gill beneath her, taking a moment to enjoy the sight of the rest of Gill's ensemble, the top half a barely-there lace construction clinging tightly to Gill's small breasts and just begging to be peeled away with teeth. Thus glutted on the sight of her body all wrapped up like a gift, Julie raises her eyes once again to look at Gill's face, at the self-satisfied little smile she wears and the amused light in her eyes.

"You," she says, feeling the heat in her cheeks, in her whole damn body, "are just full of surprises." Her hand touches down on Gill's stomach, slides its way up over satin until she feels the rasp of lace against her palm and the swell of breast beneath it, squeezes lightly, doesn't break eye contact.

"Love you," Gill responds, barely a breath, and she doesn't get the chance to say it again, can't say anything, because then Julie's mouth is on hers, swallowing the words right out of her mouth.

Things blur a little, then. Julie still can't say it, thinks she might break if she does, burn away with the force of it, but she wants Gill to know it, feel it, does her best to show her. Her hands cover Gill, her mouth descends, and it's a mess of sensory input: here the taut lines of Gill's throat quivering under her lips, there the smooth slide of her palm over a silk-covered hip. Hair tangles in her fingers, a sharper tug, and the lace is rough against her mouth when she catches a nipple between her teeth. Gill makes noises, guttural and approving, and they just add to the cacophony. Julie glories in it, drowns. She moves down, kissing through fabric, hands fisting in silk as she pushes it up, exposes a thigh and slides her fingers beneath it, lifting Gill and tugging her closer. The silk flutters back and there are no knickers beneath it, nothing but Gill, open and bare.

Julie doesn't dive right in. She lifts Gill's leg, plants a kiss on the inside of her knee, looks at her, all stretched out and dishevelled, pink in the cheeks and hair spread out against the duvet. She kisses the inside of Gill's other knee. "Tell me," she whispers in a voice that comes out low and gravelly. "Tell me what you want."

Gill's back arches against the covers and she gives a petulant little moan, struggling to find her voice. She only half does. When she speaks, the sounds catch on her breath. "God, you. Your mouth. On my cunt. God, Julie, _please_."

Julie smiles, but it's a cover for the heat licking through her. Making Gill Murray plead is one of her favourite things, as is hearing her name - her actual name, which Gill never says - whispered like a prayer. But Julie won't make her wait long tonight. She's breathless and writhing, looks half-starved. Julie moves her mouth further down Gill's thigh, kisses again, this time heavy with intent.

Julie's phone rings on the nightstand.

They both freeze, poised for a moment as though it will go away, as though they can make it stop with the sheer force of their willpower. Someone out there has more, though, because it buzzes again, and Julie knows she can't ignore it. No one would ring at this time of night but work.

Julie lets Gill's legs down gently, growling in protest. "Fucking hell," she grouses, shifting to the side and reaching out to retrieve the handset, "someone had better be dead."

The caller ID identifies Janet as the person with the horrible timing. Julie takes a moment to compose herself before she answers. "Dodson." She's proud of how it comes out, doesn't sound murderous at all.

"Ma'am, it's Janet. I'm sorry to be ringing you so late, but we've had a bit of a problem here that I thought you should be aware of. Rachel and I are at Oldham General with Helen Bartlett. She took an overdose this evening."

" _Oh, God,_ " Julie breathes, feeling all the lingering heat drain out of her as her gut twists into a guilty snarl. She sinks onto the bed, can see Gill in her peripheral vision, rising in concern, gathering up her robe. "Is she…?"

"They think she'll be okay, but they're still running tests."

 _This is our fault,_ Julie thinks. _Our fault, our fault, our fault_. "Well, I… Thank you, for letting me know. You'll call me if there are any more problems?"

"Of course, ma'am." There's a moment's hesitation on the other end, then Janet asks: "Should I call Gill? Or will you...let her know?"

Julie feels her eyes widen slightly. Gill hasn't mentioned telling her, but if anyone's likely to have worked it out, it's Janet, and Julie knows they can trust her. "I'll tell her," Julie says, and leaves it at that.

"Right. I'll text you once I know what's happening, call if anything goes wrong. See you tomorrow, ma'am."

"Wait," Julie says, glancing at the clock. "You two will probably be at the hospital a while yet. Get some sleep, take the morning. We'll see you at ten. Eleven, if you need it."

"All right, ma'am. Thank you." Janet rings off. Julie sets the phone back down on the nightstand, lets out a heavy breath.

"What is it?" Gill asks, behind her. "What's happened?"

Julie doesn't turn around. "Helen Bartlett. Tried to kill herself." Julie scrubs her face and the fingers of her other hand tighten around her knee. " _Jesus_."

"It's not…" Gill starts, but her voice breaks off when she sees Julie's shoulders tighten.

"It is," Julie says, then rises to her feet. She's full of restless energy, suddenly, heat turned to a wiry itch. Finds her own robe and wraps it around herself, hugging her waist. "I need some air," she says.

Gill makes a noise of protest, soft and pained, and that cuts through Julie, too. She turns back, looks at Gill, small and rattled on the bed. Feels torn in two different directions. She reaches out, touches Gill's cheek, waits for eye contact. "I'm sorry," she says. "I can't." _This is not about you_ , she hopes her eyes say.

After a moment, Gill nods. "Okay," she whispers.

Julie's fingers linger on her skin. "Get some sleep," she says, and tries to smile. A moment longer, and then Julie turns, headed for the deck, for the 'bad day' packet of cigarettes hidden in the cabinet, for silence and cold air and ghosts Gill doesn't need to see.


	5. Chapter 5

**v.**

Julie isn't in the bed when Gill wakes up. She doesn't immediately realise, when the alarm goes off and her brain shakes away sleep, because actually waking up alone is the more familiar sensation, but after a moment she misses the warm arm reaching for her, the sleepy groan, and she rolls to find the other side of the bed empty. She touches the sheets and there's a fading warmth, so Julie _has_ been here, but somehow she's beaten the alarm this morning, which is very unlike her.

Gill pushes herself up and swings her legs out of bed, feels the flutter of satin against her thighs. She looks down at herself, sighs. It's a fucking travesty to still be wearing a thing like this in the morning. She feels a fool, shimmies it out from under her and yanks it over her head, letting it fall to the floor and reaching for her robe instead, wrapping herself up in it.

She finds Julie in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast table with her hand curled around a cup of tea but not drinking, not doing anything but staring into space. She's wrapped in her own robe and her hair is wet, hanging limp around her shoulders.

"Hey," Gill murmurs, not sure where they are this morning. She's not sure how she feels about Julie's disappearing act last night, but she doesn't want to be angry, not when the circumstances were so dramatic and so far outside their control. She slips past Julie on her way to the kettle, slides a hand onto her shoulder and squeezes briefly. "Did you sleep?" she asks, as she moves on.

Julie looks up, watches her as she picks up the kettle and refills it. "Some," she says, but doesn't sound like it at all, sounds tired into next week. "Not much. Sammy found me on the settee though, when he got in. Woke me up. We chatted for a bit and he sent me to bed. Couldn't nod off again, though, so I got up."

Gill doesn't want to ask what they talked about, doesn't want to feel the bite of resentment over the fact that Julie would talk to him about what's going on in her head, but not to her. Doesn't want to think about the fact that she hasn't so much as caught sight of Sammy since all this began, either. She knows he's here, checks to make sure his bedroom door is closed every morning, but it's rough, the wacky hours that mean they don't even get to say hello. It is what it is, though, and if Julie found she could talk to Sammy about what was going on, well, at least she talked to someone.

"Is that warm?" she asks, nodding toward the mug Julie's fingers are wrapped around.

Julie lifts it up, takes a sip. "Not really," she answers, after.

"I'll make you another, then." She flicks the kettle on, moves back around to the table to take Julie's mug from her, dumps the cold tea down the sink. "Will you eat, if I make something?"

Julie makes a face, queasy and disinterested, but after a moment it fades. "Yeah, all right," she says.

It's not enthusiastic but Gill doesn't need that, all she needs is willing. If Julie hasn't slept, the least she can do is get a good meal in her, and Gill turns toward the fridge, sure she can scrounge up something decent since Sammy's trip to Tesco yesterday.

She's right. Bless her son and his ridiculous teenage appetite. There are two dozen eggs in the fridge, what looks like about half a kilo of ham, and a bulk tray of sausages besides. Gill eschews the latter but helps herself to the former, finding a full loaf in the bread bin as well and depriving it of some slices.

She turns the toaster on, fries the eggs and ham. Finds a few tomatoes, too, slices and cooks them up, serving it all in a stack atop buttery toast, with a fresh brew for both of them. Disinterested or no, Julie perks up a little when the plate is pushed in front of her, and Gill is glad to see it, because even if she won't talk, won't sleep, at least she'll allow herself to be taken care of in this small way. In the end, she eats with gusto, finishing well before Gill does and looking better for it, far more animated as she finishes her cup of tea.

"Right," Gill says, after she collects the dishes and dumps them into the sink to deal with later. Even with Julie showered, an impromptu cooked breakfast leaves them with less time than she'd like. "I'd best go get washed. You ready to face the day?"

Julie takes a deep breath, nods, and this time Gill believes her. She makes to move away, down the hall toward the bathroom, but Julie rises, catches her sleeve, stops her in her tracks. "I don't know how much I can say," she murmurs, "about… But I _will_ make up for the rest, I promise you that." Her hand moves around Gill's waist, tugs her in for a kiss.

Gill smiles at her, after. "Okay." Her fingers slide down Julie's arm as she pulls away to move down the hall, and really that exchange raises more questions than it answers, but it will have to be enough for now. At some point, Gill will have to sit Julie down and tell her that it wasn't the truncated sex that bothered her (well, no more than it would bother anyone who was worked up and ready to go), but the tendency Julie has to pull away into herself, wall up like that. At some point they'll need to have that conversation, but now is not the time.

*

When Gill hangs up the phone after talking to Julie, she thinks about Helen Bartlett. ' _Does it implicate Joe Bevan?_ ' Julie had asked, then, almost too casually, ' _What about Helen?_ '

The truth is, Gill doesn't know. She's prepared to concede that her assumptions based on Janet's interview with Cairns may have been off-base, but there's still too much unclear and conflicting information for Gill to be comfortable placing her unequivocally in the 'innocent in need of protection' category, as Julie has.

She's conscious of the fact that she's biting her lip as she types up a brief summary of the report and its supporting documents and sends all of it through to the CPS, who've asked to be kept up to speed with any developments where Helen Bartlett is concerned. _Further reports to follow_ , she adds at the end, wondering what Helen will have to say about Cairns' experience.

All of it sits wrong with her, but she wonders how much of that is about Helen herself, and how much of it is about Julie's peculiar emotional response to her situation. Is that why this type of arrangement, working with your partner, is thought to be so fraught? Not because of the strain it puts on a relationship, in the end, but because of the way it can make you question your professional judgement? Julie has been in Helen Bartlett's corner, so to speak, from day one, and Gill can't quite fathom why. Her reaction to the news last night had been extreme, had hurt - Gill had been there, ready and willing to listen, let Julie talk it through, but Julie hadn't come back, and eventually Gill's reason and need for sleep had sent her to bed.

Was it their difference of opinion on Helen that made Julie reluctant to talk, or was there something deeper, something else? After all, despite how much they share with each other, there have always been things they haven't been able to talk about, but up until now Gill thought she'd at least known what they were. For a lot of years, Dave was one such topic.

Julie had never liked Dave. The first time they met, polite smiles gave way quickly to forced ones, and before the evening ended Julie was throwing barbed comments and Dave making generalised, passive-aggressive statements that attacked the things she believed in. _Strong personalities_ , Gill told herself at the time, but after a few similar instances it became clear that her time spent with Julie was best spent sans-Dave, and after a few sly comments from Julie and answering sharp responses from Gill, he became a thing they didn't talk about, couldn't if they wanted their friendship to remain intact. Even so, there were social events where they crossed paths, and those never went well. The only notable exception was Gill and Dave's wedding, which ran smoothly, owing in no small part to Julie's polite decline of Gill's socially obligated but anxiety-riddled offer that she be in the bridal party. 'You know I don't wear dresses,' Julie said at the time, 'don't know anything about them; I'd be the most useless bridesmaid ever.' She attended the wedding as a guest, gave Gill and Dave her congratulations and an impressive gift, then stayed out of the way for the rest of the night, for which Gill had been eternally grateful (years later, watching Rachel Bailey marry Sean, Gill would finally have an inkling of what it must have been like for Julie that night - not that she didn't like Sean, she didn't know him - but the spectacle of watching another intelligent woman marry an idea of what life should be rather than someone who actually suited her would be painful to endure).

And so the practise of Gill and Julie mostly ignoring Dave's existence when they spent time together worked well enough, until one occasion when it spectacularly didn't.

It was Gill's birthday, a quiet dinner party affair that was all Gill was up for in between having a six year-old and being away all week with the Crime Faculty. Perhaps she should have rallied her energy and organised something larger, less intimate, but Gill had thought that on her birthday, at least, her best friend and her husband would make the effort to be civil to each other.

She was wrong. The night began well enough, with drinks and laughter and gifts, Gill and Dave and Julie as well as Janet and Adrian, who were part of Gill's circle of friends by then, Anne and Michael, a couple who had been neighbors to Gill and Dave at the first house they rented and had stayed friends since, and Greg, Gill's brother.

Drinks and chatter were fine, and even the entree went well, but by the time Gill served the main course, the wine was flowing, and not even Dave and Julie seated at opposite ends of the table could stop them sniping at each other.

'Do you want a hand?' Julie asked, when Gill got up to serve. 'It's your birthday. You shouldn't have to do all that.'

'It's fine,' Gill said, smiling. 'Stay.' As she moved off into the kitchen, though, she knew that Dave was going to take Julie's comment as exactly what it was, a dig at the way he just sat there and let his wife serve the dinner on her own birthday. It wasn't a criticism without merit, but it was just one of the things Gill chose to ignore rather than make a fuss over, and commenting on it was not up to Julie.

As Gill expected, by the time she returned to the dining room with the main meal, Dave had started in on a story about Debbie, one of the women he worked with and thought little of. Dave was charming, animated, and even when the contents of his stories were questionable, they were funny. But making fun of women in the workplace was a thing guaranteed to make Julie angry, and Dave knew it. Gill shot him a look as she set his plate down, silently warning him to stop, but he affected not to notice, barely breaking stride as he picked up his cutlery.

'So I told her, if you don't know where to put it, love, I can't help you.' He underscored his punchline with a leer, and the table laughed, at least a titter from everyone except Julie, who was taking a drink, and whose glass thudded down onto the table in the aftermath of mirth.

It got worse from there. Julie's earlier comment was the red rag. Dave didn't like being challenged, so he spent the rest of the meal raising topics that he knew Julie would disagree on, trying to get her to bite, and Gill watched it all with a growing sense of helplessness as the others - apart from Janet, who also seemed aware of the underlying tension - chatted on obliviously. They didn't know Julie, didn't know that she was usually blunt and sharp and not even slightly shy, and that silence from her was a gathering storm.

It didn't break until dessert, when Dave turned his pointed commentary on Gill.

Anne had been telling them a story about their daughter, Siobhan, and a playdate she'd had with Sammy, which had culminated in both children wearing play wedding dresses, making vows to each other in front of a stuffed frog celebrant. Anne had pictorial evidence, she said, great fodder for when they were older, and Gill laughed, delighted, only hearing about it for the first time.

'God, that's brilliant!' Gill exclaimed. 'You'll have to get me a copy to hold over him when he's twenty. Why have I not heard about this? Dave, why didn't you tell me?' Gill was smiling, but Dave wasn't, when he replied.

'You were away. I can't tell you about every little thing he does. You miss things, when you're not here.'

Gill's smile fell, and that was what did it. Julie's voice came from the other end of the table, quiet but deadly. 'She misses less than you. That's why she's got the job.'

The table went silent, an instant death of conversation profound enough that Gill could hear the clock on the wall in the living room, several seconds ticking by while Julie's chin lifted in challenge, Gill's heart sank into her stomach, and Dave's expression froze as he worked out how to respond. When he did, it was with a smirk. 'I never went for it, love. Did you?'

Julie looked about to respond, and no, Gill was not having this. She wasn't going to sit here and watch her husband and her friend go at it like children, making their other friends uncomfortable and her feel like a pawn between them. She tugged her napkin off her lap and flipped it onto the table, a referee’s flag. 'Think I need a smoke,' she announced, and pushed her chair out. 'Julie?'

She didn't wait for an answer. Turned on her heel and left the room, grabbed her smokes off the kitchen bench and headed out to the deck. Outside, lit one, leant against the railing, looked out at the lights dotted across the moor. Julie joined her a moment later. 'Can I bum one of yours?' she asked, indicating the cigarette pack by Gill's hand.

''Course,' Gill replied, but didn't turn to look at her. The packet rustled, the lighter flicked, and then Julie was leaning against the railing beside her.

'Am I wrecking your evening?' she asked.

Gill snorted, but there was no humour in it. 'Not all by yourself, no, but would it kill you to play nice with my husband for one fucking dinner?'

Julie sighed. 'I was trying to, but the way he _speaks to you_ , Gill, how can you…?'

Gill turned, found Julie looking at her. Her expression was righteous, hard, and it made Gill angry. 'You know he was doing that to get at you, don't you?'

Julie's eyebrows went up. 'And that makes it okay?'

'Is it okay to make pointed comments about serving the food?'

'Well, it is your birthday,' Julie said. 'He could have got off his arse.'

'Right, it's my birthday. And it's my bloody marriage, too, Slap. If I have a problem with the way my husband's behaving, I'll tell him. I don't need you to do it for me; do you know how patronising that is?'

Julie's eyes slid away from Gill's, out toward the view. She took a drag on her cigarette. After a moment, she said, quietly, 'Would you? Tell him?'

Gill felt a sick twist in her stomach, clamped it down. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

Julie's eyes swiveled back to meet Gill's again, gaze knowing and heavy, but she didn't reply.

Gill filled the silence. 'Dave is my husband. I love him. We have our issues, same as anyone, but we work them out. You don't see inside that, and I don't have to explain to you why I didn't insist on him serving the dinner, or anything else. What I need from you is a friend who can support my choices and respect me enough to know that they are mine, and if you're not willing to do that, I don't know where that leaves us.'

'Okay,' Julie said, looking at the ground. 'Okay. I'm sorry. I'll...' But she couldn't finish the sentence, and everything about her body language rang untrue. Gill accepted the apology, though, and after their cigarette they rejoined the group in the dining room. Julie left earlier that night than she usually would have, making an excuse, and their goodbye was subdued.

After that night, their contact was sporadic and shallow for two full years. Gill would put off calling, and when they did speak and make plans one of them often cancelled and postponed for a later that wouldn't happen for months. It wasn't until Sammy was eight and, after Gill returned from one of her work trips, told his Mum how his nanny Isobel had been staying for dinner most nights while she was away, and watching telly with Dad after, that Gill finally sought to repair the friendship. She asked Dave about the dinner dates, like she'd asked him about the strange phone calls back when Sammy was little, and he had a reasonable explanation, of course, but Gill knew. She still didn't do anything about it, didn't know quite what to do, was still clinging to her fantasy of a life at that point, but she did close the door on Dave in her head, and that gave her room to reopen communication with Julie. They caught up, and although they still steered clear of talking about Dave, Julie must have sensed the shift in Gill, because things got better again.

Gill wonders, now, what else they may have failed to share throughout the course of their lives, what other things were too difficult to talk about. She doesn't get to keep wondering, though, because her phone rings and breaks her out of her reverie.

"Gill Murray, MIT," she answers, giving her head a shake to clear out the cobwebs.

"DCI Murray, Christina Lu from the CPS. I've just read the report you submitted, the statement from Phillip Cairns regarding his assault in 1977. This makes the prospect of dropping charges against Helen Bartlett all the more complicated. DSI Dodson has been adamant throughout this investigation that Helen Bartlett be treated as a witness, but there are other factors to take into account with this case now, and we'd like to know what your views, as deputy SIO, are on the matter."

 _Oh._ Gill takes a deep breath.

*

Gill feels uneasy all afternoon about how Julie will react to her conversation with the CPS. When Julie tells her they've refused to drop the charges with that _look_ on her face, there's a twist in Gill's gut even though she thinks she approves, but there's no time to talk because people are shuffling into the briefing room. At the pub, after, she pushes it to the back of her mind, talking and laughing with the others, but there it remains, lurking, rearing up again on her way home in the car. This is something she has to tell Julie, a point at which professional and personal have intersected, and how will Julie respond to that?

Julie isn't far behind her, pulling into the driveway as Gill is unlocking the front door. She will have made an excuse to leave the pub a few minutes after Gill - _I might head off too, leave you all to it. Can't get pissed with the boss lurking by your shoulder, can you?_

Gill leaves the door open, heads inside. She dumps her work things on the side table, and she's in the kitchen when she hears Julie close the front door behind her. She pulls two wine glasses from the cabinet, opens the fridge to retrieve the open bottle of white they started yesterday but didn't finish, and she's in the process of pouring when Julie finds her in the kitchen, comes up behind her and slides hands around her waist without so much as a word.

"I've been wanting to do this all day," she breathes, over Gill's shoulder and into her ear, nudging her nose into Gill's throat and pressing a kiss against it, taking a deep breath that Gill knows is all about breathing in the smell of her. "Don't know why I picked today to torture myself wearing satin; felt like you against me every minute."

Gill feels a wave of desire roll through her, cants her head a little to allow Julie's mouth better access, even as the more sensible part of her baulks at this, remembers what she has to say, and wonders what happened to last night, if all that is just erased now, as if Gill isn't allowed to have any lingering feelings about it.

The sensible part wins out. Gill sets the wine bottle down and twists in Julie's arms to dislodge them, presses one of the glasses into her hand. "Come inside," she says, and Julie looks a little wary but nods, reading Gill's body language effortlessly.

They sit at opposite ends of the settee, turned toward each other so they can watch each other respond. Gill takes a sip of her wine and tries to decide which issue to tackle first. She ends up going with the personal, given how uncertain she is about what Julie's response to the professional will be.

"I'd like to know what happened last night," she says eventually. "Not with the sex - news like that would ruin the mood for anyone - but why you thought you couldn't talk to me about it, about what it meant to you that bothered you so much."

Julie takes a deep breath, sits silently for a time. Then, "There are bits of me that I don't want to burden you with. Bits of history that don't have anything to do with you, that I like that you're separate from. I like that I can be with you without them."

Gill takes a breath of her own, a sip of wine, lets her mind work through that. It seems there are still things she doesn't know about Julie, secrets she's never shared. That bothers Gill a little, though of course no one shares absolutely everything, how could they? Julie, though - Gill has known her for a long time, knows what kind of woman she is. Knows that she cares a lot about others, thinks about people's needs in a way that Gill often doesn't. On the phone last night, the moment when Julie told Janet to make sure she got some sleep and gave her and Rachel the morning off had struck Gill; it was the kind of thing that would never have occurred to her to offer. It's something she loves about Julie, that concern, but it does make Gill wonder about her motivations when it comes to keeping secrets.

"I'm not sure how I feel about that," she says, in the end. "I suppose the question is still why. Do you like being without them because of _you_ , or is it because of some idea you've got about protecting me? Because if it's the latter, I don't want that. I don't want you to feel like you have to have some facade of strong with me. I can handle all of you, even the rough parts."

Julie's lips quirk up, but it's a wry sort of smile. "We've known each other thirty years, Gill. You've seen more of my weak and ugly than anyone else ever has."

"But there are still things you don't trust me with? Surely it has to be different now. We have to work to make it different."

"It's not about trust," Julie says, giving her head a little shake. "I think it is about me, mainly. There might be a little bit of protectiveness, though, if I'm honest. I suppose I have been...doing that for a long time, holding things back. Not to protect you, as such, but to protect our friendship." Julie glances down at her hands, back up again. "There was a long time where I didn't want you to know the extent of how I felt about you and how that affected my life, because that wasn't fair, because I didn't want to make it weird. There might still be some of that, some habits that are hard to break."

Gill's known since this began that Julie's feelings were fully-formed well before Gill even admitted the possibility of her own, but she's always been vague about how long, and Gill has never asked. She's not inclined to now, doesn't want to push Julie into awkward admissions, but she does want to make her own thoughts clear. "Well, we're in this together now, so whatever is left of that that needs to change," she says. "Silence isn't going to protect us anymore."

"Yeah," Julie agrees, nodding. "But there are other things that are all my own, things that need to stay within me because _I'm_ not comfortable sharing them. I can work on the other stuff, and on being more open, but I'm going to need you to trust me a little, there, that I can figure out the difference."

Gill nods slowly. She's not sure she's entirely satisfied, but they've opened a dialogue about it now, and she can live with that. Can trust Julie, even if trust isn't the easiest thing for her, a lot of the time. "Okay," she says, and offers a little smile of her own.

That leaves them with the other half of what Gill wants to say, and the relief of having the personal aired is short-lived. Gill glances at her lap, twists the stem of her wine glass in her hand, lifts it for a sip. "There's something else I need to tell you," she says, looking up at Julie. "About work."

Julie has reclined into the cushions a little, tension eased. She takes a sip from her own glass, arches a brow. "Oh?" There's a nonchalance to her movements, but her eyes turn suddenly piercing, like she's on the job again.

Gill holds her gaze. "Someone from the CPS called me this afternoon. They wanted my opinion, as deputy SIO, on the Helen Bartlett situation."

Julie's arm lowers until her wrist rests across her thigh, and after that she goes still, almost preternaturally so. "And what did you tell them?" she asks.

"Well," Gill says, "I didn't lie. I told them I had my reservations, and why, and I think in the end it may have been what they needed to make the decision they made."

Julie's lips part and she draws in a breath. "Jesus, Gill. Of all the people I might have expected to go over my head, I never thought you would be one of them."

"I didn't..." Gill's voice sounds wounded and she makes a conscious effort to strengthen it. "They called _me_. What was I supposed to say?"

"That you supported your SIO's recommendation! Whether or not you agreed, I wouldn't have thought that would be a lie."

Julie's cheeks have come up pink, her voice has gained a strength of its own. Gill remains still, tries to keep her thoughts and her voice reasonable. "They put me in a difficult position, but I think, considering how fundamentally we disagree on this, what a complicated situation it is, it _is_ better that it goes to trial."

"You disagree! No one else does. Except for the press, of course, and Joe bloody Bevan."

"That's not fair," Gill says, and this time she is wounded.

"Isn't it?" Julie asks. "You're all looking for someone to blame, someone other than him. Jesus, Gill." Julie pushes herself off the cushions, turns away, leans her elbows against her knees. "Jesus. I was trying to _protect_ her. More than anything I wanted to spare her the scrutiny of a trial."

"Does she deserve that protection, though?" Gill asks.

"Yes!" It's almost a shout. Julie looks up at Gill again, and her eyes are full of disappointment and hurt, maybe even disgust. "The girl was beaten, molested by her parents, and you think that she should have had the presence of mind to say no to her father, or to tell some mythical third party about what was going on in her home."

"It's not mythical," Gill says. "A teacher, a friend's parent; god, when she was older, a police officer."

"Phil Cairns told a police officer! Look how far that got him! He was a grown man reporting an assault and no one believed him. How much less of a voice do you think a troubled young woman would have?"

Gill's conviction falters for a moment, but she resolves it. "A trial. That's what we're talking about, not a conviction. It's the fairest way."

Julie lets her head fall back, gives a mirthless laugh. "Fair! When confidential information about her has been published in the newspaper? When the press have crucified her as the demon lesbian? There's nothing fair about that, Gill. Nothing." Julie's free hand balls into a fist, and her voice is choked, when she speaks again. "No. We've failed her, again and again, when we didn't take Phil Cairns seriously, when one of our own leaked information to the press. _I've_ failed her. I told Janet to to tell her everything would be all right if she cooperated, that we wouldn't press charges, and now she has, and it's destroyed her emotionally, and I can't follow through." She turns on Gill. "Because you, because you couldn't just support my decision." There are tears in her eyes now, her face red with anger and pain.

"I..." Gill starts, but Julie cuts her off.

"Do you think she can handle a trial? Do you? Weeks, maybe months of scrutiny, when she couldn't even handle three days of it without trying to hurt herself! I..." She turns away again, reaches out and discards her wine glass on the coffee table, rises to her feet.

"That's not your fault, Julie," Gill says, realising belatedly that she's called her by her name for some reason. An attempt to pull her back? "You can't take that on as your fault."

"Can't I?" Julie turns to face her again, knife-sharp. "You want to know things, Gill? Things I've never told you?" She makes an agonized gesture with her hand, toward the door, toward someplace _out there_ in the world. "I've been there! Not where Helen is, never there, but I've been in that room with a lover who tried to kill herself, in that post-attempt interview holding her hand, because the world is _shit_ , Gill, it treats queer women like shit. And do you want to know what I thought, when I was there? That maybe if I was able to give her more of me, maybe it would be enough, but I couldn't, ever, because I was too fucking in love with my best friend."

Gill feels like she's been slapped, like the words she said yesterday have been twisted around on her and used like a knife. "Don't you dare," she whispers, but then her voice rises despite herself. "Don't you dare throw that word at me now, like that! I am _not responsible_ for the way you felt about me, for the way you never told me, for things I didn't know. You want to keep things to yourself, fine! But you don't get to pull them out later and lay them at my feet. You don't." There are tears in Gill's eyes now, one hand in a fist and the other wrapped so hard around her wine glass that it's in danger of breaking.

Julie turns away again, marches over to the side table. When she gets there, she wraps her hands around its edge, gripping hard. Shoulders tense, she stays that way for several moments, and then her hand digs into her bag and Gill hears the jangle of car keys. Julie rights herself, gathering up her things, half turns.

"I'm going home," she says, half over her shoulder and half to the living room. Her voice is steady but tense. "Before we say anything else. Need a night in my own bed, I think."

Gill doesn't respond, and Julie doesn't wait for an answer. Without another word, she tugs her jacket on, pulls her bag over her shoulder and leaves. Gill hears the front door bang closed and the sound of Julie's car starting up, and then nothing. The house is silent, leaving Gill with nothing but the noise of her thoughts.


	6. Chapter 6

**vi.**

Julie's alarm screams at her for ten minutes before she finally wakes up. She's in her own bed and her eyes are grainy from both tiredness and tears. She rolls over, shuts the noise off, sends a text message to Gill that says _working from home this morning, in later_ , before rolling over and going right back to sleep.

When she wakes again, it's almost nine. Sun slants in through the windows and she watches the dust float through a beam, still not moving, although she does feel more rested now, like she hasn't in days. Like maybe now she can make decisions that aren't completely ill-advised.

She rises, makes tea, finds an old robe to wrap around herself and goes out to sit in the garden. She makes a phone call, sends another message to Gill: _meeting with Karen Zalinski at 11, will keep you posted_ , gets one back with an update on the day so far, nothing else. She lights a cigarette - bought the pack on her way home last night, will have to toss it if she can't leave them alone after this morning (yet another thing she and Gill did together, giving up smoking, though they both cave on occasion) - and closes her eyes, taking a drag and letting the sun fall on her face, weak but warm.

Julie thinks about what she said the previous night, what they both said, and she sighs. It was a betrayal, what Gill did, and Julie thinks it will be some time before she can properly forgive that, but what Gill said was right too. She hadn't known how deep this ran for Julie, how personal it had come to feel, and how could she, when Julie refused to tell her? She regrets what she said, deeply - or perhaps more the way she chose to say it. There may well have come a time when Julie felt it was right to talk about Abigail, about some of the mistakes she made in her earlier relationships, but it definitely _wasn't_ right to lay them at Gill's feet like that, and god, _why_ had she chosen that moment to finally spit out that she loved Gill? How can she ever repair that, say it again without reminding Gill of that time she said it in anger, used it to hurt and manipulate? Why had she done that?

Julie's gut twists. Exhaustion, she wants to blame, forty-eight hours with only about six of them sleep, but that's not really an excuse, is it? The look on Gill's face after she said it, like she'd just been hit, that's going to stay in Julie's mind for a while, and it's not something she can take back.

She thinks about the other thing, about Gill saying _that's not your fault_ , and she wonders about that, too.

It was cutting, with Abigail, and it had started long before Julie met her. She remembers it being one of the things that attracted her, perversely, that network of scars up her arms. Made her interesting, to Julie's young, stupid, privileged little mind - who was this woman, what sort of life had she led? One of the first things Julie had done after leaving her sheltered school life and moving out into the world had been to seek out people's stories. She knew the world she lived in was not perfect - not least because she'd never quite fit into it - knew that it was largely built on the backs of others, and she'd sought to distance herself from that, to learn about how other people lived and how the world treated them. Discovering the disparity between her life and others' and wanting to do her part to make a difference in that - protect and hold everyone equally accountable under the law - was one of the things that had drawn her to policing. But that went hand-in-hand with a far less admirable rescuer complex of Julie's that had persisted for many years after she joined the force, and Abigail, with her scarred arms and sad eyes and ratty blonde hair, had been exactly the sort of broken bird who appealed to that side of Julie.

It was a trainwreck from the very beginning. Abigail came after Helen, after Julie had pledged her commitment to her work and started wearing the rings, around the same time that Gill and Dave got serious. That alone, that reactionary urge she felt to find someone because Gill had, should have told Julie that it was a very bad idea, but she certainly hadn't developed that sort of self-awareness at that point in her life, and so she'd flung herself into her relationship with Abigail with everything she had, determined to know her, to love her, to rescue her from herself.

Painting and poetry were Abigail's things. No job and and a falling-down little flat that Julie moved into, renting the property she'd bought with her inheritance and letting the mortgage pay itself off while she shared two rooms with Abigail and drank wine out of coffee mugs, thudding around in Doc Martens and congratulating herself on how raw and real her life was. She thought that even when Abigail cried in the night and slipped off to the bathroom while Julie slept so there were fresh slashes on her arms in the morning; perhaps even especially then.

And it was real, Julie doesn't want to dismiss that. Abigail's pain was the product of very real trauma, and Julie knew that even then, but she'd cast herself as the stable saviour, and when time wore on and she couldn't ease Abigail's pain, things became rather too real very quickly.

She became a bad girlfriend, the kind who stopped being able to deal with the night-time tears and the bloody sink and so left the flat, went to the pub and went home with other people, usually women but occasionally men; became the kind of copper who stayed at work until all hours and then stumbled home pissed at four in the morning. They became the kind of couple who shouted unforgivable things at each other one minute then fucked the next, burying words under each other's skin with knees between thighs and fingers curling and tongues that tried to make up for the things they said.

And then one night Julie came home and found Abigail in the bathroom in a pool of her own blood. She called an ambulance and rode with her to the hospital, was there with her every second she was allowed, blaming herself, wondering if she could have done more, could have stopped this from happening. In one moment of both hysterical irrationality and acute self-realisation, she wondered if her latent feelings for Gill were what pushed her into this relationship in the first place, which made her feel even more guilty, because what damage had she done?

Their relationship didn't last long after that. Julie stuck it out for a while, until she was satisfied that Abigail wasn't going to try and hurt herself again and have no one there to find her, but after the danger had passed they parted ways. Julie stayed with Mary Jackson when she left, a few weeks on a sofa after giving notice to her tenants, because by then Gill and Dave were living together and Julie couldn't possibly share a roof with him. Gill never knew the extent of what that relationship had cost Julie; Julie couldn't tell her.

But that didn't make any of it Gill's fault, any more than Abigail's issues had been Julie's fault. She knows that now, really, with the benefit of years, so why had she brought it up like that last night? And how has she come to conflate Helen Bartlett's situation so tangibly with her own experience; has she fallen into the trap of casting herself as the valiant protector once again?

Julie doesn't know, and the fact that she doesn't is telling in itself. She's too tangled in this, too close to see, and it means that she needs to step back.

With that in mind, she finishes her cigarette, drains her tea. It's time that she showered and got on her way. She needs to eat something and there's nothing in the fridge, and of course, it would never do to be late for her appointment with Karen Zalinski.

*

"I'd like to get back to Duke Street, ma'am."

Once she's settled in the Assistant Chief Con's office, Julie gets right down to business. She knows that Karen Zalinski's not one for small talk, and indeed, she's sitting behind her desk looking at Julie quizzically. It feels rather like being sent to the headmistress's office, like Julie had been, once or twice, in her school days. All her teachers had been like Zalinski, too, tight posture and perfect pronunciation. Julie surreptitiously wipes her sweaty palms off on her trousers.

"Why?" Zalinski asks, tilting her head.

"The investigation is winding down. After Joe Bevan's confession yesterday and the list of names he supplied, I expect the process of identifying the victims will go much faster than we previously anticipated. Even with the extra personnel, DCI Murray is more than capable of overseeing the remainder of the case by herself. I think my time would be better served returning to my regular duties at Duke Street."

"All right," Karen Zalinski says, without preamble. Julie is astonished, tries to hide it and probably fails. Zalinski folds her hands on the desk. "That's your judgement call to make, and if you think you'd be better use to us back at Duke Street, I won't argue with that. The department can't afford to be without one of its Superintendents for much longer anyway. There is, however, the matter of Helen Bartlett being charged. The press needs to know about that."

Ah. Here is where it's going to get interesting. Julie steels herself, keeps her voice as measured as possible. "I'd appreciate it if DCI Murray could represent me at that press conference as well."

Zalinski's eyebrows lift just slightly. "You've been with me at all of the conferences to date, Julie. Don't you think it would be better for us to show a united front?"

Julie rakes her hair away from her face with her fingers. "Maybe, if it _was_ a united front. But it isn't. I recommended from the very beginning that Helen Bartlett be treated as a witness, and yesterday the CPS undermined me by calling Gill and basing their decision on her opinion. I think this move is political, an attempt to placate the press and the public. But the truth is we failed Helen Bartlett, we failed her in 1977 when we didn't properly investigate Phil Cairns' statement, and we've failed her this time around as well, with the leak we couldn't stop. The CPS have made their decision, and I'll accept it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand behind you at a press conference and implicitly support it." It comes out far more forceful than Julie intended, especially that last bit, and Julie grimaces internally, leaning back in her chair with her hands gripping the armrests, bracing for the bollocking.

Zalinski leans back into her own chair, surveying Julie with an expression that makes her feel like she's being peeled apart from the inside. "This one's got to you, hasn't it?" she asks, after a time.

The question throws Julie, as does the lack of reprimand. She coughs out a laugh, barely stops herself from saying _you don't know the half of it_. "A bit, yes," is the answer she gives, congratulating herself on the understatement. "The way the media have painted her especially, demonising her queerness under the pretense of justice. _Visited female prostitutes,_ as if that was even slightly relevant to the situation at hand."

Zalinski studies her for a few moments more, then nods. "My sister is gay," she says. "She said much the same thing." Julie nearly falls out of her chair, because Karen Zalinski hasn't shared a single piece of personal information with her in all the months they've known each other, not so much as a _traffic was awful this morning_ , as if she misted into existence in her office each morning. Julie doesn't know quite how to respond. Thankfully, she doesn't have to, because Zalinski continues. "DCI Murray to attend the press conference, then. We all have the cases that get to us, Julie. Just don't make a habit of it."

Julie finds her hands are shaking again, but she manages to stutter out a response. "Thank you, ma'am, I won't."

*

By the time Julie emerges from the meeting, there's another message on her phone: _Joe Bevan implicated himself in Sheila's murder, hurray!_ Julie smiles, and hits the button to dial back before she thinks about it, and it's only when the phone starts to ring that she remembers the weight in her gut, but by then it's too late to back out.

"Hi, Slap." Gill's voice is friendly enough, when she picks up, but there's a wary note in it that isn't usually present, and it makes Julie ache. She decides to keep things simple.

"Good news about Joe Bevan," she says, projecting positivity but wondering if she sounds a little queasy herself.

"Yeah," Gill agrees. "He had a few choice words for Rachel after he slipped up; he was _really_ mad."

Julie laughs despite herself. "Well, good." Sobers a moment later. "Hey, I'm headed back to Duke Street. It's all yours from here on out. Thought it was probably time."

Gill takes a breath, then: "Okay," full of weight and understanding.

"You'll be doing the press conference with Karen Zalinski, too, about charging Helen. And Joe, I suppose."

"Okay."

And that's all Julie needs to say about work, and probably all she can say at all, at least right now. Can't just leave it at that, though.

"Can I come round to yours, later?"

Another beat of silence before Gill answers. "All right."

"Let me know when you get off?"

"I will."

"Okay, I'll see you tonight, then."

"See you."

Julie hangs up. Now, all she has to do is get through the day.

*

Julie thinks about seeing Gill all day. She returns to her office at Duke St and finalises the paperwork on the Bevan job that she should ostensibly have completed while 'working from home' that morning. She emails the necessary people to let them know she's back on the job, makes a few phone calls and catches up on everything that happened while she was out, all the while thinking of Gill, both aching for the chance to see her and dreading it, because what will she say? She keeps remembering the look on Gill's face before she left last night, and being terrified that she'll have to see that again.

Mixed feelings aside, when her phone finally pings with a message from Gill that says she's heading home now, Julie is glad. Anything has to be better than sitting here with only half her mind on her work. Julie finalises the task she's working on, packs up her things, and departs.

When she reaches Gill's, she finds the front door unlocked, lets herself in. "Hey," she calls, after she's locked the door behind her, wanting Gill to know it's her.

She finds Gill in the living room, sitting with a glass of wine and a magazine. She lays them down on the coffee table when Julie enters the room. The magazine cover is curled back, but a full-page advertisement of a woman with pouty scarlet lips is visible - a glossy, and that tells Julie that Gill's been just as preoccupied as she has, choosing to read something mindless rather than the periodicals she's otherwise fond of.

"Hey," Julie says again, quietly, finding that she's come to a stop in the middle of the room.

"Hi," Gill replies, and it's not a smile she gives in greeting but it's not the look from last night, either. It's something tentative, questioning. Open, or at least willing to be.

But Julie's standing in her house, so it's up to her to make the opening parley. "I'm sorry," she says, and she's never meant anything more in her life. "Sorry for what I said, for the way I said it. Everything, really. You're right, it's not fair to keep things from you and then throw them at you like that, and I'm not sure how I can make up for that, but I hope you'll let me try."

Gill is silent for a time, and when she speaks, it isn't really a response to Julie's apology. "I did hesitate, you know, when the CPS rang me. I want you to know that. For a few seconds, I hesitated. But I wouldn't have, if it hadn't been you. I wouldn't have thought twice about giving them my opinion if I thought some other super was off the mark, and that's why I did it, in the end. I don't know if I was right, god, I really don't, but I thought that if we couldn't agree, it probably should go to trial. I still think that. I thought since we said we wouldn't let _us_ get in the way of work, I should do whatever I would do. But that was never going to work, was it? Maybe not acknowledging that was where we really went wrong." By the time she finishes speaking, her eyes have slid away from Julie's, panned across the room. She's not looking at anything in particular; Julie can tell her gaze has turned inward, and Julie has been there herself enough times this week to know that it's not a happy place Gill's gone to.

That, more than anything, spurs Julie forward. She closes the distance between them, stands before Gill, reaches out to touch her cheek, waits for the gesture to pull Gill's gaze up to hers. "Did we really go so wrong?" she asks, when Gill's eyes meet hers.

"I don't know," Gill whispers. She's not crying but her voice is ragged like that, like she might, and in the next moment her eyes do turn watery, just enough to reflect the light. "I did, and you said, and what if it keeps happening? What if it happens too much, and it all turns to shit like...like it has before, and... I don't think I could do that, Julie, I don't think I could cope without you in my life."

Julie's heart aches, and the solid thing that's been in her gut all day turns hot, like fire. She sinks to her knees in front of Gill, takes both of her hands and grips them tightly. "You won't have to, Gill. Ever." Gill's eyes are focused somewhere above Julie's head again, though, so she pauses. "Look at me, please, Gill." She waits until Gill does before she continues. "I love you. I've loved you for half my life, long before I ever thought you'd love me back, long before I ever even hoped. Even if this does go wrong, if somewhere down the line we realise it isn't working the way it is, there is nothing you could ever say or do that would push me away. Nothing, all right?" Gill is crying now, properly, face turning pink and tears on her cheeks, but she nods. Doesn't say anything - can't, maybe - but she nods. "I love you," Julie repeats, just in case she missed it the first time.

"What about before?" Gill asks, eventually, voice small. "With Dave?"

It takes Julie a moment to sort through the shitstorm of problems included under the header of 'Dave' to connect Gill's words about losing her with the two years they spent hardly speaking, but when she does, Julie can't help but smile. Nearly laughs, actually, because for such a terrifyingly intelligent woman, Gill can be an idiot sometimes. "I didn't go away, did I, you daft cow? I was just waiting, waiting for you to be ready to admit what you needed to. Waiting for you to ask for help, and I was there when you did, wasn't I?"

"Yeah," Gill agrees, with a little smile of her own now, "you were."

Julie squeezes Gill's hands, then lets her grip loosen a little, enough to trace her thumbs across Gill's palms, drawing circles. "I hope you can forgive me for what I said. And if you want me to explain about Abigail sometime - not now, but sometime - I will."

"It's okay," Gill breathes. "I just wish I'd known, been there to help you. I don't know how you do it, hold so much inside you like that. You do it at work, too. It must be a jungle in there." She slips one hand free, reaches up to touch Julie's temple, push her hair away from her face.

"Sometimes, yeah," Julie says, with a smile that's a little sad. "Get lost in here, I'm not careful. That's why it's so good to have you. You're really good at cutting through."

"I forgive you," Gill says, fingers against Julie's cheek. "I hope you can forgive me, too."

"I already have," Julie replies, and is surprised to find that it's true. This morning, she wasn't ready to, but at some point during the day she's turned a corner, set it aside. Perhaps when Karen Zalinski agreed to let her. "It's the job. We've never let it come between us before, and I'm not about to start letting it now."

"Good," Gill answers, voice adamant. "I'm glad we didn't manage to mess that up completely, inside a week. Now," she gives Julie's fingers a tug, smiles. "Come up here a bit, because I want to kiss you."

Julie does. Lifts her backside off her heels and stretches up, and Gill's fingers rake back through her hair as she tugs Julie closer, then her lips are on Julie's and they taste of salt, but she's not crying anymore. Julie's free hand falls onto Gill's thigh, her other still tangled up with Gill's, holding on tight. 

"Love you," Gill whispers when it's over.

"Love you back," Julie replies, and then they look at each other, and Julie's hand slides over Gill's thigh, and suddenly all of that truncated desire from two nights ago comes flooding back. "God, I want you," she whispers, burning with it.

" _Yes,_ " Gill replies in a breath, tugging Julie in for another kiss, only this time it's demanding, Gill's fingers fisting in Julie's hair and her teeth nipping Julie's bottom lip. Julie growls into it, disentangling her hand from Gill's and sliding both of them around her hips to tug her forward on the settee cushion, skirt rucking up with the motion and Julie helping it along, pushing it back far enough to nudge Gill's knees apart and crawl between them. Julie pulls her even closer, close enough that she can use this angle she's created to stretch her chin up and press her lips against Gill's jaw, then her throat, mouthing along the lines of her to the place where her collarbone meets the edge of her top. She's still wearing her work jacket and Julie divests her of that, pushing it down off her shoulders and helping her shrug it off, then nuzzling her face into Gill’s breasts as Gill's fingers tangle in her hair again, pressing kisses there, too, open-mouthed through the fabric of her top.

Julie's hand is snug against the curve of Gill's back, holding her close. She doesn't want to let her go, not for a second, not even long enough to make it to the bedroom. Her mouth moves up again, finding Gill's skin, kissing her chest and tugging her top down enough to mouth along the edge of her bra. Gill is making noises, urging and appreciative, and Julie doesn't want them to stop. She lifts her head a moment later, though, looks up at Gill, cheeks flushed with heat and eyes full of need.

"Are we too old for me to have you right here, like this?" Julie asks, sliding a hand over Gill's thigh again.

Gill laughs, though she sounds rather breathless. "I'm not, I'm sitting on a cushion. Hell on your knees, though."

"Hmm," Julie murmurs, sliding the tips of her fingers beneath Gill's skirt.

"Why don't you come up here?" Gill asks, giving Julie's hair a tug. "Want you in me, and I want you to kiss me while you fuck me."

"Not demanding at all, you," Julie murmurs, smiling, but she's already working her hands under Gill's skirt, pushing it up even further in the process, curling her fingers around the top of her stockings and tugging them off with Gill's help, taking the knickers with her as well and tossing all of it aside.

"Get my skirt off?" Gill asks, and Julie smiles again, feeling more predatory this time.

"No," she answers, and then she's pressing her hands against the settee cushions and pushing herself up, and yes, god, that was hell on her knees, actually, but it doesn't matter because a moment later she's settling onto the cushions, one knee either side of Gill's thigh, and yes, this is much better. Julie enjoys her new vantage, taller as usual, tangling her own fingers into Gill's hair and tugging her head back. She kisses Gill again, letting her other hand roam down to Gill's breasts, squeezing, then getting her thumb around the edge of Gill's top, tugging it down, pushing bra straps down off shoulders and pulling that down as well to expose her, cupping her breast and twisting a nipple between thumb and forefinger. Gill moans into Julie's mouth.

"Can't have you over the desk like I want," Julie murmurs against Gill's lips, letting her hand travel down over Gill's stomach to nudge in beneath the confines of her bunched-up skirt. "But I can have you right here, just like this." She presses her hand forward, cups Gill's mound, rocks there for a moment, watching Gill's eyelids flutter, the curve of her open mouth as she breathes a sigh. Julie gives Gill's hair a tug, traces a finger along her slit, feels Gill arch against her hand. God, this, the sight of her, buttoned-up together Gill, all dishevelled and wanting and writhing against her hand, this is all Julie wants from the world.

"Please," Gill breathes, "don't tease, not tonight."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Julie murmurs, smiling, using her fingers to spread Gill's wet, feeling out the shape of her. "Way I left you hanging the other night, think I owe you more than one." She mouths along Gill's jawline, up to nip at her earlobe, slips a finger into her cunt.

"Mm," Gill groans, gripping the edge of the settee with one hand and reaching for Julie with the other, fingers falling against her thigh and curling. Julie feels the blunt scrape of fingernails through her trousers. "More," Gill demands.

Julie chuckles against Gill's skin. "And you call _me_ bossy." She tugs Gill's head back even further so she can mouth at the skin below her ear, so she can bite it ever so gently as she obliges Gill and adds a second finger, curling her thumb so the back of it will grind against Gill's clit, rocking back and forth, feeling the elastic of Gill's skirt pushing back against her hand with every thrust.

They both lose their words, then, Gill to rumbles and moans and Julie to concentration. She curls her fingers, scissors them, maintains her rhythm, mouth still moving over Gill's skin but watching her as well, watching the way her throat quivers as her breath turns ragged, the flicker of her eyelashes as her head pushes back, as Julie grips her hair even harder. She feels, too, feels Gill's thigh shaking between hers, feels that hot, slick cunt quivering around her fingers, and there is nothing, _nothing_ more beautiful than watching this woman fall apart.

" _Fuck,_ " Julie hisses, finding her voice with difficulty, "you're fucking _gorgeous_ , Gill." She increases her pace, sucks at Gill's throat, hums against her skin. "Come," she breathes into her ear. "Come for me. Want to see you. Want to feel you. Come for me, Gill."

And Gill gives a strangled cry, and then she does, shaking around Julie's fingers and pressing her head back into Julie's hand, which flattens immediately, still tangled up in hair but cradling the back of her skull now, holding her tight and riding her through it as her cheeks flood crimson and her jaw quivers and her legs tremble and jerk.

Julie brings her back slowly, letting her fingers slide out but continuing to stroke, letting her hand slip out of Gill's hair to cup the back of her neck, thumb tracing back and forth over throat and holding her, just holding her, until she opens her eyes. "Beautiful," Julie whispers when she does, smiling, leaning down to kiss Gill's mouth again. Gill smiles languorously, after, taking some time to recover her words.

"Now, I want you in my bed," she says when she does, and Julie lets her hand slide out from between Gill's legs. She kisses Gill again, and they don't move immediately, but when they do Julie helps Gill up onto legs that are satisfyingly shaky. Julie collects the discarded clothes while Gill rights the ones she's still wearing, and then they're moving toward the bedroom, Gill's fingers finding Julie's and tugging her along.

They're barely in the bedroom door when Gill turns. She takes the bundle of discarded clothes from Julie's hands and tosses them in the general direction of the hamper, then she's stepping right up into Julie's space and reaching for her collar. She doesn't speak, just looks up, gaze heated and adamant, and begins to pluck Julie's shirt buttons undone. Julie keeps the silence, watches Gill work, slightly stunned as always by just how it feels to be the subject of Gill Murray's intense concentration. By the time her shirt is unbuttoned, she feels bare already, but Gill surprises her when she doesn't push the shirt off. Instead, she grips the open edges and uses them to tug Julie forward, taking a step back herself, and another, until she's backed herself into the wall, pinning herself between it and Julie.

Julie doesn't know quite what Gill is going for, with this, but she reads a challenge in her eyes so she plays along, rises to it, reaching up and pressing her palms against the wall, caging Gill's shoulders. She smirks, because really this is not one of Gill's best laid plans, giving Julie the opportunity to loom over her like this.

"What happened to the bed?" she asks, letting the challenge carry into her voice, low and sultry.

Gill gives her own smirk in response. "Sod it." She slips her hands under Julie's shirt onto the bare skin at her sides, and adds, "Stay like that." Too late, Julie realises that she's been had, that this - her hands pressed against the wall, leaving her body open to all sorts of touches - must have been Gill's plan all along. Julie's smile turns long, twisting across her face as she concedes defeat to the superior player. Gill smiles back at her, smug as anything, sliding her fingers over Julie's skin. She draws circles on her sides, a feather-light touch that makes Julie's skin quiver, then she she reaches around, working her fingers up to unclasp Julie's bra, tracing the curve of it back around then sliding underneath to palm Julie's breasts, thumbs tracing over nipples and that look on her face again, that devouring concentration. Julie murmurs in appreciation, a purr that follows the tingle of sensation Gill's fingers create in a hot line straight to her cunt. Gill doesn't let up, pushes Julie's bra aside enough to slide in closer, lifting Julie's breasts and closing her mouth around one nipple, sucking and flicking with her tongue, and god, the sight of it. Julie's murmur becomes more of a growl, her fingers flex against the wall but stay there. She shifts on her heels, letting her thighs rub together to disperse some of the heat pooling in her.

"Jesus, Gill," Julie breathes, watching her as she turns her attention to the other breast. It's agonizing, not being able to touch her, just watching as Gill's tongue flicks out to drag over her pebbled nipple, as she wraps her lips around it and sucks. "Fucking hell." Julie shifts on her heels again, grunts, and Gill looks up at her and grins.

"More?" she asks.

"God, yes." She makes to move, thinking to drag Gill back to the bed, but Gill pins her with a look, and Julie freezes. Gill's hands travel over her torso again, down, fingers curling around Julie's belt and sliding it open, taking her time pulling leather through buckle. Julie growls, shifts her weight again, fingertips scraping against the wall.

Belt undone, Gill plucks open the button of Julie's trousers and pulls her zipper down, and then she's sinking, holding on to Julie's hips and dropping to her knees, still looking at Julie with that secret little smile. She tugs at Julie's trousers, loosening them around her hips, then her hand is sliding round to cup Julie's backside, pull her forward, and lips trail along the top of Julie's knickers before Gill looks up at her again.

"Right here," Gill whispers, looking hungry. "Want you right here, like this." She gives Julie's trousers another tug to give herself more access, then she's kissing her right through her knickers. Her mouth is open, jaw working, and Julie can feel Gill's tongue moulding to the shape of her, and god, god, it feels so good, but it's not enough.

"Get these off me," Julie whispers. Begs. "Please. Need to feel your mouth on me. Properly. Please."

Gill looks up, smiles. "I could say no; I'm sure I could get you off just like this." She presses her mouth into Julie's mound again, sucks her through the damp fabric. Julie's heel twitches against the carpet. "But you did ask nicely, didn't you?" Gill adds. She lets her hands slide over Julie's legs, cupping her calves on the way down until she reaches her feet. Lifts one up, tugging the short stocking off Julie's foot, then sets it back down and removes the other, then she's working Julie's trousers down and they do the dance again, leaving Julie in her knickers and half- removed top. Gill's hands trail up over the backs of Julie's thighs again, cup her arse, fingers sliding up beneath her knickers. She pulls Julie's hips forward, pressing a kiss against the right side of her pelvis, then she's mouthing along the waistband of knickers again, and Julie watches as she pulls back, tugging the elasticated band away with her teeth.

"Please," Julie begs again, almost sick with need, and Gill lets the elastic flick back against Julie's skin, chuckles.

"All right," she breathes, finally, and tugs Julie's knickers down.

She doesn't waste time, then. Shuffles forward a little, positioning herself, and then her hands cup Julie's arse again and pull her in, and then Gill's mouth is on her cunt. She sucks, licks, and Julie's eyes close and her head falls back, but only for a moment, because she wants to see this, doesn't want to miss a single second of it, Gill in this position of worship. It's glorious, the view, Gill's mouth on her, eyelids downcast in focus, her hair all mussed from earlier. Julie can feel it, too, Gill's hair tickling her thighs, hands squeezing the cheeks of her arse, and her mouth, oh fuck, her mouth. She sucks at Julie's folds, lathes her tongue over the apex of Julie’s thigh, nuzzles in so the tip of her nose is alongside Julie's clit, and then her tongue is spreading Julie apart and sliding into her cunt, curling up into her and pumping in and out.

" _Fuck_ ," Julie whispers, pressing herself closer, pushing against Gill's mouth. "God, yes, just like that." She wants to let go of the wall, wants to bury her fingers in Gill's hair and pull her in, wants to fuck herself against Gill's face until everything falls apart, but she doesn't, leaves her hands against the wall like she was told, feels her fingernails scrape against it, hips thrusting, every inch of her burning up as Gill's tongue fucks her in the same articulate way it does everything else.

"God, Gill," she breathes again, barely able to speak. Her voice is gravel, smoke, ragged and dry. "Your fingers. Give me your fingers."

Gill complies. One hand lets go of Julie's arse and slides around, comes up beneath her, and Gill's mouth moves up as she slides two fingers into Julie, curling them in as her lips settle over Julie's clit, tongue coming up underneath and sucking, sucking as her fingers push in deep.

" _Fuck,_ " Julie hisses again, grinding on her, thighs burning but it's nothing, nothing at all compared to the heat of Gill's mouth on her, to her fingers in her, curling and twisting, and she's rising, rising, hissing at Gill not to stop, just don't stop, fuck. Gill doesn't let up, increases her pace and the pressure of her lips. Julie whines, hips jerking, and then she breaks, flinging her head back as she flies apart, shattering into a million pieces and staying there, somewhere else entirely, riding wave after wave until she finally comes crashing back into her body, weak in the knees and leaning hard against the wall, looking down at Gill again, who is still there, lapping at her in the aftermath of worship, smiling up with her eyes.

" _Gill, god, fuck,_ " she breathes, but she can't stand any longer, not for another minute. She lets go of the wall, reaches down for Gill and waits for her to grab her hands, then she's pulling them back and they're tumbling onto the bed, both of them breathless and exhausted.

It doesn't last for long, though. Julie becomes aware that they're still half-clothed, and suddenly she wants nothing between them. She rises up, tugs off her shirt and bra and goes to work on Gill, peeling skirt and top and underwear away until they're pressed together naked, breasts against each other and thighs tangled up. Gill makes a noise, a needy little whimper, and Julie pushes her onto her back, covers her, and the whimper comes again so Julie brushes the hair from her face, kisses her, covers her breast with a hand.

" _Julie, yes,_ " Gill breathes, arching against her, wrapping one hand around Julie's back and tangling the other in her hair.

Julie's mouth presses against Gill's throat again, her knee sliding up between Gill's grasping thighs, and then she's curling an arm around her and pulling her close, holding her tight and rocking her there, feeling Gill slick against her and grinding into it, gripping the back of her knee with one hand and stroking her with the other - breast, hip, everything she can reach. She kisses Gill hard, breathing into her mouth, and rocks, and soon Gill is shaking against her once again, quaking in her arms, and Julie licks the sweat from her throat and rides her through it, lets her catch her breath then pushes into her again, knowing she can take it, can make it.

She slides her hand down between them and slips a finger either side of Gill's clit, knowing she'll be sensitive but pushing her further, rocking her knee and letting the momentum push Gill against her fingers, and then she's there again, voice a strangled cry. Julie holds her even tighter, then, tiny and spent and broken, keeping up the motion until at last the whimpers fade away, and they're left tangled and bare.

"I love you," Julie whispers in the quiet, after, stroking a thumb over Gill's cheek. They're pink, her cheeks, her face sweat-damp and her hair all a tangle, but her eyes are warm, looking at Julie like there's nothing else in the world, and Julie doesn't think she's ever looked more beautiful. "I love you."

Saying it doesn't shake the earth, it turns out. Now that she has, it's obvious to Julie that it's the most natural thing in the world. It feels like breathing, like saying her name, and it's because, Julie realises, she's been saying it for years. She said it when she introduced Gill to her horse, when she put on the rings, she said it when she waited for Gill to wise up to Dave. She's said it with her hands, with her fingers and her tongue, so many times since this began. It's only the saying it with her voice that's new.

Gill reaches down, takes her hand, tangles their fingers together and pulls their hands up between their chests, so that Julie can feel Gill's heartbeat and Gill can feel hers. "I love _you_ ," she whispers back. That doesn't shatter the world either, Julie thinks, but it certainly fills it up. Makes it an easier, more beautiful place, the kind Julie never wants to leave.

Julie smiles, though, lets her lips curl into a cocky grin. "Of course you do, you dozy cow. Three orgasms? I think I love me, too."

Gill laughs, a long, hearty giggle that shakes her entire body, and pulls Julie even closer.

 _What happens after you get what you've always wanted?_ Julie wonders, returning to her thought from two days ago and answering it: _this_. The woman you love in your arms, laughing, holding onto you in the aftermath of a storm you've weathered together. It's not perfect; like everything else in life, making this work will take diligence, communication and compromise, but Julie knows it's worth the effort. Right here, in between Gill's thighs, in this space they've carved out for themselves away from all the noise of the world, this is where she wants to live.

Gill's thumb traces over hers. "Did you mean it, what you said earlier, about half your life?" Her head is nestled into the pillow now, lazy and sated, but her eyes are curious.

Julie smiles, sighs, because it's a complicated question. Once, being asked that would have sent her into a panic, but here and now she feels safe enough to attempt an answer. "Yes," she says, "in one way or another. It's not… I don't want you to think I spent my entire life _pining_ , or spent every minute we were together secretly wanting you, but yes. There's been a space in here for you for a very long time, a place no one else could touch. It's changed its shape, over the years, but it's always been here." She glances down at their joined hands, uncurls her fingers and presses her palm against Gill's, sliding it down enough that their fingertips touch.

"For me, too," Gill whispers, and Julie looks back up at her. "All those years I called you instead of him, wanted you with me rather than anyone else. I think maybe I just didn't realise. How did it take me so long?"

"You're ridiculous," Julie murmurs, smiling, catching Gill's fingers and lifting her hand to press a kiss against her palm. "Ridiculous, useless straight girl, but it doesn't matter, because we were idiots then, and we aren't anymore." She kisses Gill's fingertips, one after the other, feels her shiver. "Is that my cue to turn you over again, or are you cold?"

Gill chuckles and drags a finger over Julie's bottom lip. "As enticing as you are, I don't think I could go again if I tried. Under the covers, I think."

"All right." It's a loss, when they disentangle themselves, but Julie's feeling the cold too, really. Takes herself off to the loo while Gill turns back the covers. She washes her hands, opens the bathroom door again, finds Gill already in the bed, half-covered, the duvet outlining the curve of her hip but the rest of her on display, turned toward Julie in invitation.

Julie pauses in the doorway, smiling at the sight. "What do you think they'd say, if they could see us now? Rachel, the lads, _Kevin_?"

Gill arches an eyebrow. "Well, Rachel would just be confused, poor lamb - she called you 'Mrs Dodson' today. The lads, who cares? And if you _ever_ mention Kevin in my bedroom again, lady, it'll be the last time you see it."

Julie laughs. "All right, understood."

Gill lifts the bedcovers. "Now, stop asking stupid questions. Turn that light off, and come in here and kiss me."

Julie does.

~FIN~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to again acknowledge the role my fantastic friends/fellow fangirls played in making this story what it became. Thank you, kk, for all your beta effort, for the suggestions that have most certainly made this fic better and more complete. Thanks to sidewayswithanaubergine, for helping me distinguish between what an Australian thinks is British and what actually is, and for helping me add that Northern flavour and depict the region as accurately as possible. And to sophiagratia, my fantastic cheerleader, thank you so much for your early comments, for the headcanon emails and the comments all over the fic about wanting to kill me for giving you so many feels. You have no idea how motivating those were. Or, well, maybe you do, since here is the 30k of evidence, but yes. 
> 
> I want to acknowledge here how much input soph had in the formation of headcanons that became the bits of story that have given this fic the texture it has. The flashback moments were added with her encouragement, and much of what happens in those interludes is the product of enthusiastic discussion. Some of the ideas she helped provide me with include pregnant!Gill, which I initially had trouble picturing, Julie Dodson the bad girlfriend in her youth, and also the Actual Nun with the rings as devotion to her work. There are more, I'm sure, ideas I would not have come up with if they had not first come up in discussion, but mainly I want to emphasise that while I did put all of this into fic, the idea-generating phase was intensely collaborative, and this fic would not be half of what it is without that.
> 
> So thanks to you lovely ladies who helped me write something I'm quite proud of, and thank you, too, to the readers who have left comments/kudos/likes, etc. It is is very gratifying to know that people have enjoyed! :)


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